NGE: Nobody Dies: The Yomiko Absolution
by EarthScorpion
Summary: Kei fled rather than face her sisters; the Angel War came to an end without an Instrumentality in a messy peace.  But now, 20 years later, the next generation has come to fix their parents' mistakes. And make new ones. AU of ND; diverges from Chapter 69.
1. Prologue: Kei Comes Clean

**2nd of October, 2034**

"_Happy birthday to you!  
Happy birthday to you!  
Happy birthday, dear Yoo~oooomi  
Happy birthday to you!_"

The birthday girl grinned, faced her cake, which was of a size more commonly used for wedding cakes, and blew out the 10 candles on the top.

Rather too hard, it might be noted.

* * *

...

**

* * *

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: The Yomiko Absolution**

**Prologue: Kei Comes Clean**

* * *

...

* * *

There was a moment of hesitancy, as mother, father and daughter stared at the mess on the far wall.

"Ooops," Yomi said, massaging the back of her neck with her hand.

Kei sighed. "You'd think we'd learn, wouldn't you?"

Kaworu leant down, wrapping his arms around the two special girls in his life. "Yes," he said, grinning widely. "Probably. But it's not like you two aren't going to eat it, anyway."

His wife turned pink. "That is a vile calumny! A slanderous allegation rooted in base..."

"...truth?"

Kei deflated. "Well, yes. But that's besides the point. I mean, you can't just go around saying that... Yomi, at least scrape it onto a plate. You're getting it all over your face and uniform."

"Mmmph?" the girl asked, removing her face from the wall. A pink, and very long tongue, licked her face clean. "Fine! And... no!" she informed the metre-high, ape-like biped which had been the source of the tongue. "My cake, Raphael! No! Bad Israfim! It doesn't even have any alcohol in it, so you wouldn't want it."

The Israfim set its shoulders. "**Fine. Didn't want it anyway,**" it said, as it headed back out, flicking the tail that it didn't have as it went.

Her older brother flinched slightly, and raised a hand. "C-can I h-have some?" he stammered, working his mouth around the still-difficult words. "I... pr-promise I'll like it." He blinked, brown hair shot through with grey falling over his face. "I... I h-helped 03-Ef E5 with m-m-making it," he said, with a hint of pride.

Kaworu placed his hand on his wife's shoulder. "You know, now would be a good time," he said, softly. "While I go and fetch the replacement."

Kei winced. "I... I don't know if I can do this," she admitted. "It's... why can't you be with me?"

"Because she needs to hear it from you."

His wife said nothing.

"You can do it. We've been preparing for this."

Kei set her jaw. "Yes. Okay."

"Good. Well done," the man said, giving her a small hug. "Come on, Logos," he told their adopted son. "Let's go have some of the back-up cake."

"Ock... okay."

"Although I think I might need some hugs tonight," Kei whispered into her husband's ear, as she stood up.

"My dear, I will be happy to hug you all night... as well as anything else you might want."

Kei smiled, as she patted Kaworu on the bottom, and stepped over to her daughter, peeling a handful of cake off the wall.

"Mama!" Yomiko protested, even as her father and adopted brother left.

"Mmgagat?" she asked, mouth full.

"That's _my_ birthday cake!"

"Yomi, there's another one."

"But it's smaller!"

"Let's not get into questions of who ate who's birthday cake," Kei said, swallowing and wiping her hand clean. "There's something I..."

A red-eyed gaze was directed at her. "It was you. Who ate mine."

"Mere technicalities." Kei blinked. "But. Yomiko Leliel Nagisa." She swallowed again, this time not due to stolen cake. "I... I have to show you something. That... that I've been meaning to for a while, but... but I've been delaying. But you're now 10, and... well some things you just need to know."

Yomiko stared at her. "Is this about puberty and sex?" she asked, suspiciously. "We have had talks on both of them at school, you know. And Isabelle is already starting to get," she cupped her hands onto her chest, "breasts." She looked down, at the two cakey handprints on the front of her school blouse. "Oops."

Kei blinked. "No. That's a different talk, which we have scheduled for the Christmas holidays."

"Ah." Yomiko paused. "So, what is it?"

"Come with me." Her mother rolled her eyes. "We're going to have to get these clothes in the wash anyway."

* * *

...

* * *

Deep under the mansion, mother and daughter emerged from the vents, human-looking once again. This was somewhere deep, down in the laboratory section; a vaulted chamber which smelt sterile, almost metallic. Mounted on the walls were six empty cylinders, man-sized, and a larger glass-walled tank that filled one side of the room, but most of the floor-space was taken up by nine large boxes. The thrum of electronics was palpable.

"Where is this?" Yomiko asked, looking around the bare white room. "I don't think I've been here before. And... I thought I'd been pretty much everywhere in the house." The girl grinned. "One way or another."

"Not that you'd remember it, no," her mother said. Kei smiled. "You were conceived down here, though."

"Ewwww."

"In that tank, actually," Kei said, pointing.

"Ewwww. Again. I didn't need to know that."

"Probably up against the wall, or maybe it would have been floating in the middle..."

"La la la! Not listening! Lalalala!" Yomi caught the smirk on her mother's face. "Oh, ha ha. Argh! Why are you so embarrassing!" She stuck her hands in her pockets. "So... really. What else is this place for, apart from you and Dad doing _stuff_ with kissing and _**babies**_ and general ick?"

Her mother suddenly looked serious. "This is the room which I hoped I'd never need. Well, unless I wanted another child, but after we adopted Logos, and... well, it never seemed fair to you to..." she shook her head. "Never mind."

"I... wouldn't mind a little brother or sister," Yomi said, hesitantly. "Too much."

"Well... yes. This is in part the emergency room, in case you, or me, or your father, or your brother started to have core problems. I have LCL supplies..."

"LCL?"

"I'll explain. Yes, I have LCL, the appropriate cold-sleep equipment, and... well, to stop us from dying or... or worse." Kei placed her hand against one of the boxes. "And this is one of the nine supercomputers that your siblings run on. It took a lot of effort, and the GDP-equivalent of a small nation, but I managed to recreate the MAGI design from nearly first principles. It was before you were born," she said, with a hint of nostalgia. "Well, I needed to keep them safe, and after the... well, AIs were decidedly unpopular for a while. They didn't even have human rights; they were legally just _things_. I had to work out how to keep them properly safe, and give them a good place to operate from." She caught her daughter's stare. "What?"

"I know some of those words," Yomiko said.

"You know a lot of words," Kei said, with a hint of weariness.

"Of course! But..."

"Please don't interrupt, Yomi. You are going to get a full explanation, but for now, please, just wait." Kei stepped over to one of the blank walls, and placed her hand against it. With a cascade of mechanical clicks, the featureless wall flowed aside, to reveal several hanging garments; body coverings that only left the head exposed. One, in dark blue and grey. One, in gunmetal grey and green. Two, smaller ones, in plain white.

The girl stared at them.

"Cool!" Yomi squealed. "Superhero costumes! I knew you had to be hiding some kind of secret, but this! Is! Cool! Ohmygod! That's why I can do all the stuff I do, because my parents are superheroes! And that's why you're showing me all this stuff... oh, wow! Of course, we actually do live in a mansion with a hidden laboratory underneath! And I have AI siblings who do the butlering and stuff! How didn't I see it before! What are your secret identities? Come on, come on, I have to know!"

"Um. No. We're not superheroes."

"Awwww. I guess it makes sense..."

"These are actually..."

"... but," Yomi blinked, lips wobbling, "it feels a bit... a bit bad to realise that your parents are evil supervillains trying to take over the world. And that my brothers and sisters are actually evil AIs." She wrapped her arms around herself. "Will I have to be evil, too?" she asked, in a small voice.

"No, Yomi. We're not supervillains either."

"Are you _sure_?"

"Yes, Yomiko. I am sure that I'm not a supervillain." Kei bent down. "Really." She took a breath. "They are plug suits. Evangelion-grade plug suits."

"But why would you... ooooooh." The girl stared over at the suits, than back at her mother, then back at the suits again. "Oh. Um. Why?"

Kei handed her the smaller of the plain white ones, taking the gunmetal grey one for herself. "Put this on. I can help you, if you have problems with it... and I know I should have taught you to do it earlier, yourself, but I didn't want to. I'm going to show you, inside the MAGI."

"Wait, we have a full-immersion thing?" Yomiko asked enthusiastically, eyes widening, as she hastily stripped off her top. "Really? As in... really full immersion? Why haven't I got to do this before? You keep on saying 'no' when I ask for one!"

"Because I don't like them," Kei said, a hint of coldness in her voice. "I use them for work, but I don't want you... I don't want you having to spend your life in them. As your mother."

"But I want to! They're cool!"

"And I don't want you to. And I'm your mother," Kei said, unfastening her own top, and glancing at her daughter, who squeaked as she slipped off her socks to stand on the cold, bare floor. The girl, only just ten, has already started to grow faster, the first hints of puberty just starting to show. 'She is going to be taller than me', she thought, with a hint of pride. Yomiko took after her father quite strongly, after all. She turned her attention back to her own plug-suit. It was one of the older, simpler ones; not the exoskeletal ones rolled out later, like its mate. It wasn't as if she had been issued one; she had not actually piloted, after all.

It still fit. It wasn't surprising, she had had it adjusted, to deal with the after-effects of her pregnancy. Neither she nor Kaworu were aging properly; they both still looked like they were in their mid-twenties. And soon Yomiko might have to put up with people mistaking her mother for her sister... although her father as her brother was more probable.

Her daughter broke Kei's reverie, as she stepped into view, garment hanging baggy around her. "Um... is it meant to be like this?" she asked, hesitatingly.

"Camera, acquire target 'Yomiko Nagisa', lock on, record," Kei said, out loud, before holding out her wrist. "You see the button there. Just push it, and it contracts."

Yomi squinted at her mother. "Why are you recording me?" she asked, eyes glowing faintly.

"Oh, no reason."

She continued to stare.

"Really, Yomi, no reason at all."

"Fine. Well, then," she said, pressing the button on the plug suit's wrist. "I think... eeeep!" The girl shrieked, and leapt vertically as the white material tightened around her, clutching at herself. "It's... argh... tight. It's up against... argh! _How are you being so calm!_ It's like I'm _naked!_" Yomiko yelled, floating in mid-air upside down.

Her mother broke down into giggles.

The girl lowered herself to the ground. "Oh, great. Really, really mature, Mama," she said, through narrowed eyes. "Urgh! Ick. Who came up with this thing, and how can I maim them!"

"Well, I think I have a new ringtone," Kei remarked.

"**You wouldn't dare!**"

"Not if you keep your room clear, I wouldn't." Kei blinked. "And, Yomiko? The reverb doesn't impress me."

"**Well, I'm...**," she coughed, folding her arms. "Ooops. Well, I'm sorry, but I thought we were doing something important, rather than just having you be all embarrassing and stuff!"

Kei sighed. "Yes. I'm sorry, Yomi. It's just... I've put this off so long, that... avoiding it seems natural. Unlock immersion chambers," she ordered the dumb AI in charge of the room. "Just climb into the tube, and I can do the explanation properly." She looked at her daughter. "I'm... I'm sorry, Yomi," she said, softly.

* * *

...

* * *

"Urgh." The girl's hand went to her forehead. "That was... weird. And that stuff, the orange stuff... it's horrible!" She puckered her lips. "And yet sort of familiar, somehow."

"Well, you were conceived in..."

"Stop saying that, Mama!"

"And... ah, yes. Probably that one holiday we took, when you were very little, to the moon."

"The moon."

"Don't tell me you don't remember it?"

"No! I think I'd remember going to the moon!"

Kei smiled. "You can surprise yourself. I have your 'What I did on my holidays' thing you did, right when you were starting school. It's really very cute." She smiled, maternally. "You drew a picture."

"Really."

"Aww, Yomi. Don't be like that." The blue-haired woman shook her head. "Sorry. I'm distracting myself. Let's push on." She waved a hand, and bought up a pair of chairs, into this virtual space. "Let's start, Yomiko. What do you know about the Angel War?" Kei asked her daughter, sinking down into one of the two seats.

Yomi remained standing. "The Angel War? Well... um, it was between 2017 and 2018, and was mostly Evangelion combat synthorgs fighting against the Angels. But..." Yomi bit her lip... if what she was biting was her lip. She had always had this odd sense of familiarity about the events, this feeling that the portrayals seen on TV and in films, where the Angels were monsters advancing on human cities without stopping or trying to talk, weren't right, and she said as much.

Her mother didn't seem to react. "And Second Impact?"

"That was... 2001, I think? The Angel ADAM appeared and blew up Antartica, killing lots of people and starting wars."

"Yes." Kei swallowed. "Yomi, you are aware that we... none of us, your family, nor you, are human, and what that means?" It was important to lay ground rules.

"Well..." Yomiko chose to sit down. "That's not really true. I mean, we've all got human bits on us, and Daddy and Logos... oh, and Uncle Uri... are sort of more like a core inserted in an outer bit of human flesh, while you're much more integrated with your human bits, which are a sub-set of you, and I'm more like you in that bit. And my other brothers and sisters sort of feel like you, but they're much... fainter, maybe. Is that the right word?"

Kei stared at her. She coughed. "Uh... what?"

"We're all a bit different... well, of course, Logos is, because he's only related to Daddy, and is sort of more like his brother. But, yes. Oh, and Great-Granddaddy is all human." Yomiko shrugged. "So?"

Once again, her mother regretted not asking enough about Yomi's _other_ talents. "You haven't mentioned this before," she said, carefully.

Another shrug. "Isn't it obvious?"

Kei recalibrated her view of the world once again. "Right. Let's start from an earlier stage. Yomiko. Who do you think me and your father were before they were Mummy and Daddy?"

"Before?" The little girl seemed perplexed.

Her mother tried again, pushing on despite the ache in her heart. "What do you know about my past?"

"Um." Yomi squirmed. "Well... um, your surname was 'Shikinami' and you married Daddy when you were 18 which is really young and Great-Granddaddy is your Granddaddy. Oh, and that one time when Daddy took me to Rome when you were working we saw Uncle Uri and he had a blonde woman with him who knew Daddy, and we talked to them, and the blonde woman said that I looked more like Daddy than my grandmother."

"He did what!" Kei exploded, eyes blazing.

"Ooops. I remember now that I wasn't meant to tell you that."

"He told you that, did he?"

Yomiko sucked in a breath. "... no?" she hazarded. "Please don't be angry, Mama. Daddy looked surprised to be seeing them there," she lied.

Kei took a deep breath. "Right. Well. That doesn't matter. Right now." She cracked her knuckles. "Although he will... no, he'd just enjoy that. Drat." She swallowed, and slumped down. "That wasn't quite true," she said, softly. "Technically, I was known as that, but that was only because I changed my name."

"I knew it!" Yomiko blurted out. "I knew you were a superhero!" She received a laser-guided glare from her mother. "Sorry," she said, shrinking back into her chair.

"I was Kei Ayanami," Kei admitted, in a half whisper, staring down at her lap. "I... I am the eighth and final Ayanami-geneline clone, made using genetic material extracted from Yui Ikari, Head Scientist of Project Evangelion, at NERV. I was made using data obtained from Lilith, the Second Angel, Progenitor-Entity for all the life on Earth there was before the Impact." She paused. "Well, there were the Baraqielim," she admitted, "but no-one knew about them. That doesn't matter." She looked up to stare at her daughter, with reddened eyes. "I , along with my sisters, was made by a madwoman to kill Yui Ikari, and her son, Shinji Ikari. I... I was incomplete when her plan was discovered."

Yomiko stared back. "You... what?" she asked, blinking. "You have sisters?"

"You might have heard of one of them," Kei continued, in a flat, dead tone. "Rei Ayanami. The First Child, pilot of Evangelion Unit 05. You... you played with dolls of her and her robot at Abigael's house when you were five. I... I panicked back then. I was terrified that you'd make the link. You... didn't."

"Your sisters are the Ree?" Yomiko blinked, as her brain reprocessed the information. "You're a Ree? I'm..." she put a hand to her head. "Urgh."

"How common did you think that blue hair really was? And red eyes?" Kei asked, self-mockingly.

"Well... you have it, and lots of my brothers and sisters have it, and I sort of have it, and lots of people on TV have it. And all my family has red eyes." Yomi blushed. "I... I just thought that was how it worked."

"The hair is dyed. All dye, unless you've seen my sisters on TV." The woman sighed. "I can't say that I haven't encouraged it, too, although I can't take most of the credit. My sisters are... charismatic people."

"Wait." Yomiko raised her hands. "Let's go back a bit. You were made with... with stuff from _Lilith_."

"That's why we can't say _**babies**_ properly," Kei confirmed. "It's a lineal trait."

There was silence.

"Huh." Yomi said, eyes wide, obviously trying to keep her voice calm. "That... explains a lot. About me. And you. And Daddy as well."

Kei coughed. "Not quite. Actually, your father's side of the family were... were engineered from ADAM. At the time of Second Impact."

Another silence.

"So he..."

"Yes."

"And you..."

"Yes."

"And then you had me..."

"Yes."

The girl sniffed. "So I'm... I'm basically an Angel, aren't I? I'm... I'm a monster," she said, eyes welling up.

"No!" Kei blurted out, fiercely, to gather her daughter up in her arms. "You're not! You're not a monster!"

"I... I knew there were things that I wasn't meant to do," Yomiko began to sob, "but I didn't know why. I... I thought that... they were just things that some people could do and you told me that it was to keep other people safe so you were keeping them safe from me."

"No!" Her mother hugged her closer to her breasts. "No, not at all. God, no, Yomi." She took a shuddering breath. "Yomi, I have spent your entire life trying to keep you safe, trying to keep my... our pasts from hurting you. I... I have only ever failed once, and I still hate myself for that, still get kept up at night by thinking what could... could have happened to you in that December night. You... you are my darling little girl, and you are the best thing that I have managed to do in my life. If... if I had to keep one thing, if I could only save one thing from my entire life, I would save you."

"N-n-not even Daddy? Or Logos or the Ems and Efs?" Yomiko snivelled.

"Your father would do the same," Kei said, brushing her daughter's hair back. "We've both had lives. And... well, the others might be my children, but, you, Yomi, you're _mine_. You were inside me for eight months and 3 days, and that makes us closer than _anything_." She let her daughter cry into her. "And, Yomi?"

"'es?"

"What I have always tried to give you, above anything else, is a chance to be _normal_. To be you. Because that's something that neither me nor your father ever got." She paused. "Now... admittedly, life as the daughter of the richest woman in the world, with a mass of AI siblings, and several other things we don't have to mention here isn't quite normal..."

There was a burbling giggle from the girl.

"... but, still." She shifted, until she could see her daughter's face. "Yomi. I was made aged 6."

She got a tearful, but remarkably level gaze for that comment. "What."

"It's true."

The girl shook her head. "Uh uh. No. That's not how it works. You start counting from when you're born. That's how numbers work."

Kei chuckled. "Well... maybe. But, still, I was like a six-year old when they took me out the tank where I was grown." Her face hardened. "Or, rather, didn't."

"Wait. So if you were zero when you were six, that means you were one when you were seven, right?"

"You... probably don't want to go down that line of thought, Yomi."

"And then that means you were actually only _twelve_ when you married Daddy. That's only two years older than me! Ewww."

Her mother coughed. "I told you that you didn't want to..."

"Wait, no. Because I know Daddy once said that you started going out when Daddy was 16, which... eugh. Eww. Eww. Ewwewwewwewwewweww!" Yomiko started scrabbling at her face with her hands. "Yuck! How could you! That's icky! You were **10** and you and Daddy and... and I'm 10 right now and... ick, ick, ick!"

"Yomi. I was 16." Kei sighed. "I told you so. But we were two lonely, odd teenagers, who... well, Yomi. You have to understand. I was made aged 6. And then, until I was 16, I lived my entire life in a VR simulation like this. Only one of us was stable, you see, so... so the rest of us just got left in simulations, like dolls, and occasionally Littl... Yui, who had adopted us, would take us out and play with us, but the rest of the time, it was only us. No friends. No-one else, but us, and... I'm the sane one of my sisters."

"They're... all crazy?" Yomiko asked, gently, hugging her mother closer.

"You... you know how we, me and you, how we get sometimes?" Kei swallowed. "Like all you want to do is run and move and play and do whatever you want to do and it just seems like walls are in the way so you take the vents and you start getting funny ideas and wanting to look at _**babies**_."

"Mmmhmm." Yomiko shivered. "Those bits are a bit scary."

"Yes. They are. Well, I get them worse than you do, because your father's influence helps you keep calm."

"B-but you're always so controlled, Mama!"

"I force myself. Every day." Kei grinned, a watery grin. "It helps to have you around, you know. I just have to think, 'What would Yomi do if she caught me doing it?', and I can just keep myself down to being normally embarrassing as your mother." She shook her head. "You understand, though, how bad those bits are? Well, my sisters are like that _all the time_." Her face fell. "And Yui just left me in there. And sometimes she'd come visit, with Rei, but... she'd just leave again. And she..." she shook her head. "I probably can't explain this to you, Yomi, but I _lived_ for her. You know how Logos sometimes acts around Daddy, when he wakes up in the night, terrified that his mother is coming for him?"

Yomiko nodded.

"Well... I was sort of like that. She... she was the only example of normalcy, of sanity, of someone who could be... be who I wanted around, and..." Kei choked up. "I'm sorry, it's just..." She felt a soft hand on her cheek.

"Don't cry, Mama," Yomi said, gently, and Kei hugged her, getting her breath back.

"Anyway, yes. I... I was in the tanks for my entire life, with only occasional bits out. We'd sometimes escape, and do _stuff_, and sometimes, before 2015, she'd put Rei in, and take one of us out, and we had to pretend to be Rei, but we got to spend time around her, and... those bits were the happiest bits of my life." Kei looked down again. "And then every time, I got taken back down to the tanks, and got put back in cold sleep. Like we are, now." She wiped her eyes. "Imagine, Yomi, if you had that happen to you, that me and Daddy would leave you alone in here, and only do things with Logos, and then occasionally, we'd let you out, but only for a few hours, and no matter how much you cried, we'd put you back."

"That's horrible!" Yomiko insisted.

"No. That's the thing. It... it was just how things were. And we all knew that someday Yui would work out a way to make it so we didn't need the tanks anymore, and we... we could get out, and..." Kei sniffed again. "Anyway. Yes. When we were sixteen, we had another breakout. And I got kidnapped."

Her daughter began to shake. "Really?" she asked, lip wobbling.

"Yes."

"You were...just innocently playing with your sisters in the fresh air, rather than in this gloop, and... someone just grabbed you and you were feeling helpless and they were pointing guns at your friends and..."

"No," Kei said, stroking her daughter's cheek. "Not quite like that. Well, I had sort of taken over a military base, and held the city hostage, and they took the car I was in, using a wormhole. The giant robot had sort of thwarted me, and I hadn't even begun the thing with the laser and the circular saw."

Yomiko raised her eyebrows.

Kei coughed.

"Really." It was a single, flat word.

"Really."

"And you were ten then?"

"I was sixteen, okay!" Kei shook her head. "You have been considerably better behaved than me in that respect."

Yomiko snuggled up to her mother closer. "Are you sure that you're not a supervillain?" she asked. "But... but what happened then? Who kidnapped you?"

"And that's how I met your father."

The blue-grey haired girl sat bolt upright. "No way!"

"Way."

Yomi narrowed her eyes. "And you are, somehow, arguing, that you are not supervillains? Yeah." Her eyes widened. "Oh. I see. Daddy's the superhero, who stopped you from taking over the town. You fell in love on the way to the jail, right?"

"I find your dissection of our relationship via the medium of comic books to be... disturbing. And also wrong," Kei said.

"Are you going to claim you were the hero? Because, you know, I don't think that taking over a town counts as heroism. Plus... you do wear that metallic grey and green plug suit," Yomi remarked, critically. "It's rather evil looking."

"And now we get into the bit where we talk about your father's life," her mother said, ignoring her. "His human genesource, the person who was a father to him... was a very bad man."

"As bad as leaving people in tanks for their whole life?" the girl asked, sceptically.

"Worse," Kei said, grimly. "He was the leader of an organisation... and, well, he was basically trying to make himself into a god." She sighed. "I realise I am not helping our 'not comic book' case here. But... this was actually real life. From what I have been able to discern, he was planning to kill your father as part of this plan. He was holding me as a hostage. It...well, it didn't make much of a difference to me," she said, her tone jaded, before reconsidering. "Well, that's not true. I was actually, truly alone, for the first time in my life."

"Your ten year old life."

"Stop going on about that, Yomi!"

"Well, that's how old _I_ am! I find it funny!" the girl said, pouting slightly.

"It's going to be a nightmare to get you to help with things around the house after this, isn't it?" her mother sighed. "I... well, your father was the only person who'd visit me. I also made most of your brothers and sisters at the time, because... well, any number of reasons. I... I fell in love with him, then. Admittedly, first I chased him around the simulation with an axe, poisoned him, tortured him, beat him in kung-fu battles, tried to crush his armies, stole all his clothes and shot at him from a helicopter, had little girls stab him with syringes, and led him on by offering to kiss him and then never actually doing it. Among other things."

The ten-year old squinted at her mother. "Is... is this what adults do to say that they like each other?" she asked, hesitantly. "I mean, because I read a book on ponies, and... they don't do that kind of thing. If... if I want a boyfriend, do I need to hurt him that way?"

"Most people seem to manage without it." Kei smiled, a little dreamily. "Of course, your father is a remarkable man. Of course of course, at that point, he was still...lusting after my eldest sister. That took a while to... resolve."

"Hmm." Yomi frowned. "Right. What would a supervillain do... aha! You chased after him with a machete, didn't you!"

"... yes, but that's not what actually did it. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, here." Kei sighed. "And then I did a stupid thing. I... I was starting to go crazy. I... I accepted an offer from your grandfather. He would stabilise me, mean that I didn't need the tanks anymore, and then I would go back to Tokyo-3... incidentally, he sort of took Uncle Uri as a swap, when I was sent back." Kei's shoulders slumped. "If I hadn't done that... well. But it was done."

"So you got to go back to Tokyo-3, and go things with my grandmother...my human grandmother," Yomi said, bouncing up and down.

"She is not your grandmother. She is only a non-consensual genetics donor. She made the difference clear," Kei said, her voice hard, cold, and sudden, making Yomi flinch. She shook her head. "Yes. And at the time... I thought it was the happiest time of my life." Her shoulders slumped. "And... it was all a lie. I... I thought... I thought she wanted me as a daughter. I... I thought... I thought she was actually pleased with me. In myself. For being me." She emitted a faint, almost hiccup-like noise. "There... there was another girl, you see. She... she..."

Kei swallowed, and let Yomi hug her tighter.

"She..." she continued, "... there had been an accident. Before I... we were made. She...Yui hadn't followed safety protocols, and there had been an accident with Evangelion Unit 01."

"The purple and green one, yes?"

"Th-that one. She... she had been pregnant. Very early, because it hadn't developed a brain or a proper spine or... or anything. But... but there had been enough for the Ev-Evangelion to form a template around, that she could modify into being an AI. She... she called it Ichi... and... and..." she sniffled, "... well, I liked her. She was cute. Alwa...always stuck at six years old. But... but we didn't know. And... and just after I had actually started going out with your father, I... I found out. Because of your grandfather. He'd... he'd gone crazy."

Yomi said nothing, and merely snuggled up to her distraught mother.

"H-h-he told me this, and she confirmed it, and... and it had turned out that... that she'd only been _using_ us. As replacements. Sh-she'd loved us, yes, b-b-but only as _toys_ that she c-could take out, and put away, and pr-pr-pretend that she had a real daughter."

"No!" Yomiko gasped. "That's... horrible."

"Yes!" Kei wailed. "It's like I really loved your brothers and sisters, and just used you to have someone made of flesh to play with. And... and I went down to tell my s-s-sisters, and... and your grandfather had sent a file of s-s-something bad I'd done... not really, only in VR... and...and Little Mommy confronted me, and... and then my sisters tried to kill me."

Her daughter was biting at her virtual nails. "No," she whispered. "No way. That's... family doesn't..." She gulped. "You... you said they were crazy, didn't you?"

Kei sniffed. "I... b-before, they'd seemed harmless. And... and I'd spent my life with them, and..." She clutched her daughter tighter. "I ran. Of course. I...I couldn't beat them, and I didn't think I _could_,and... and there was an Angel attacking, too." Her mind flashed back to that confused time, so many years ago now. "I ran away," she said, softly. "I... I couldn't face it."

"Then what?"

"Then? They... they managed to kill the Angel, eventually. Uncle Uri... he managed to kill it, just as it almost got to Lilith, right in front of the doors of Termin... the place where she was kept. Yui's son... my brother, he was almost killed, when one of the lesser bodies the Angel released caught him. One of my sisters almost died, too, fr... from the effects of having the Angel too near, because she needed the tanks. I... I didn't care at that point. I was probably somewhere over Asia by that point. I... I ran here. Your father... he was the only other person I knew in the _world_, and... and I was so alone. My... my sisters were trying to kill me, my... the person I had treated as a mother all my life, who I'd wanted to be so much, she had only been using me as a companion for a giant robot, and my brother... and none of it was his fault, was almost dead... and, maybe, if I'd done something, I could have been there, I could have helped him, and..." she broke down, her daughter joining her in the tears.

"Did... did you kill him!" Yomiko demanded fiercely, when she had recovered a little.

"W-who?"

"Daddy's daddy! He... he deserved to die, for doing that to you!"

There was an awkward pause.

"You... you did, didn't you?"

Kei broke down again.

"He deserved to die! It was only fair!"

"It... it w-was actually an accident. I... and he gloated... and your Daddy shouted at him about risking things... and he said something about everything was in line with the Scrolls... and he said I'd made it all possible... and something in my head broke... and then I'm on the floor, frothing at the mouth and there's orange everywhere and Kaworu had to drag me off... off to the tanks again, before I died." Kei wiped her eyes off fiercely. "I am..." she swallowed. "I'm... sorry. I... I can't do any more of this today. I'm... I'm sorry for ruining your birthday by telling you all of this, Yomi. It's... it's just selfish of me, and... and I should have told you earlier, and I'm such a _flurgen_ coward and stupid and bad, and..."

A small hand covered her mouth. "Don't be," Yomiko said, leaning over her. "I... it's better to tell the truth, right? And... and I'm an Angel thing, but... but I know I'm not a bad person, now. You told me what really bad people do, and I won't do that kind of thing ever! And neither are you. You're my Mama! You're the bravest, smartest, nicest person I know!"

There was a wet noise from Kei. "Even when I make you do the dishes?" she burbled.

"Even then! Well... maybe it switches to being Daddy then, but you're still second!" The little girl hugged her neck. "Don't cry, okay?"

"I... I'd gone and prepared all these videos, to explain to you some more stuff, but then we just end up talking, and... and I'm a fool, and I still miss them, even though... even though I _know_ that at least one of my sisters would gut me on sight, and... and nothing's changed, and..."

"We can do that later, 'kay?" She paused. "I... I think I want to go back to the real world, now."

Her mother nodded. "Okay, Yomi."

The virtual world faded out, and they were back in the cold, white room.

"Just one thing. Um. Mama?"

"Yes?"

"Can I keep the plug suit? It's... it's kinda comfy. I like it. It's a birthday present!" Yomiko said, as the plug evacuation process began.

There followed the normal bit where the lungs were emptied of LCL.

"You said it made you feel naked," Kei remarked, after she had coughed up all the LCL into the grilles on the floor, wiping her mouth.

"Urgh. Yuck. Horrible. I can't believe you had to do this a lot," Yomi said, looking slightly green.

"I... I never actually became a pilot," Kei admitted. "I would have been the Sixth Child, but after I ran away... they had the Eva that would have been mine shipped over to Tokyo-3. It went to another girl. But... the LCL thing is something you get used to."

"I don't want to get used to this! It would mean that I'd have to do it a lot!" She wiped her mouth as well. "But... yes, but after a bit, you get used to it, right?"

"I certainly remember how long it took us to get you to wear clothes," her mother remarked. "Or to hold the same shape all the time."

"Awww, Mama!"

"I can show you baby photos, if you like. It's not my fault that they look like they should be in the Necronomicon."

"It's half your fault, surely." Yomi spat. "Urgh." Then, LCL covered, she sidled up, and gave her similarly sticky mother a hug. "Thank you, though. I... I saw how hard that was for you."

Kei rubbed her cheek against her daughter's LCL-soaked hair. "Thank you. I... I was scared that it was going to go worse. But... Yomi. Please, please, please don't go putting yourself in danger. I... I... I wouldn't be able to cope if anything happened to you, and... don't go to Tokyo-3. Ever. Even if you're curious. I... I thought that you were mature enough to be told, so you'd understand." She gripped her daughter's shoulders. "Don't go looking for your relatives without us, you understand. Considering what you can do... even the Mini-Beast-of-Light-And-Eyes wouldn't help you, if they thought you were an Angel."

"Don't worry," Yomiko said, squeezing tighter. "After how they treated you, Mama? I don't _want_ to see them. I'm fine with you and Daddy and Logos and all the Efs and Ems and my friends. I... I don't _want_ to see people that mean!"

She paused.

"Also, you and Daddy are totally either superheroes or supervillains."

* * *

...


	2. 1: Yomiko Lays The Groundwork

**5th of March, 2038**

With a creek, the door swung open, revealing a strange land. There was a bed. There were wardrobes. There was stuff stuck to the mirror that took up half a wall. There were bookcases. There were _a lot_ of books, many of them actually on the bookcases. There was pink.

The sight was immediately blocked by the thirteen-year old girl whose room it actually was, who closed, and locked, the door behind her. And then muttered a curse in ancient Sumerian, as she realised that she'd left something inside, unlocked the door, and went back in to retrieve it. Dressed in a school uniform, tie loosened, she grabbed her blazer in her hand, and went out again. Her hair, which was darkening to the blue-grey of honed steel as she got older, was piled up behind her head in a bun. The synthetic diamond pins holding it in place sparkled in the light as she closed the door behind her for the second time. And then she was off.

Along the ceiling.

No matter what her parents did, Yomiko Leliel Nagisa had a pronounced tendency, when at home, to forget that gravity was not optional.

Limbs splayed as too-long fingers scuttled along the roof, her physique would have been described as gazelle-like, all limbs and elbows, were it not for the fact that gazelles looked nothing like a 13-year old girl in the middle of a growth spurt. Crawling down the wall over the large, central staircase in the main hall, she flipped over, the carefully designed elastic keeping her skirt in place, and landed, in a predatory crouch. And then she paused. And sniffed the air. And grinned, a little too widely.

"I! Love bacon! I! Love bacon!" she sang, to the tune of the Hallejuah chorus, straightening up as she skipped down the stairs three at a time. "I love bacon! I love bacon! I loo~ooove it so!" Some people might have noticed the faint glow around Yomiko as she sang this. A sort of... white illumination, vague, but distinct, which made the dust motes in the air glitter. But it was only natural.

As she had so lyrically informed hypothetical onlookers, she did, in fact, love bacon.

Stockinged feet squeaking on the marble, drawn by the porkflesh, she turned the corner, skidding and narrowly avoiding the metre-high ape-like Israfim curled in a ball on the floor. In fact, all she managed was to redirect her motion into the wall.

"Ooof."

* * *

...

**

* * *

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: The Yomiko Absolution**

**Chapter 1: Yomiko Lays The Groundwork**

* * *

...

* * *

There was a snort of amusement from her brother.

"Shut it, Logos," she muttered, as she picked herself off the ground.

"How about n-no?"

"How about you do!"

"You two," their mother said, to the sound of sizzling bacon. "Logos, don't irritate your sister. Yomiko, don't dent the walls."

"I'm surprised you're still home at this time," Yomi remarked to the blue-haired, aproned figure, standing by the cooker. "And making breakfast and everything. Aren't you meant to be at work?"

Kei shrugged, to look back at her daughter. "I've got a meeting over in the US this evening," she said. "More problems with the continental sink borehole, I'm afraid. That thing has been nothing but trouble. I'm going to be away tonight... you'll be fine in the house, with your brother, right? I'm going to be away, and I sent a message to your father, but he's still on the moon, and..."

"Awww, come on, Mama. I'm **13**. I'm not a _**baby**_! I can be left in the house for one night!"

"Hah!"

"Shut it, Logos."

"You're still only 13, Yomi. And it might be two nights, okay? I don't like the mantle instability the latest reports are showing."

"You were trying to take over the world at 10," her daughter muttered, rebelliously. "I can be left in the house alone and stuff, okay? Especially with an older brother. And... actually lots of older brothers and sisters. So... not in the house alone at all."

"I was 16, okay!" Kei snapped, whirling around. "And that isn't at all relevant, young lady!"

"Bet you were planning it beforehand."

"Not. The. Point."

Yomiko coughed, as her mind whirred. "Anyway, I thought that, maybe, I might go around to Michelle's house. I mean, there is a party tonight, and it's easier to just sleep over than have to get back."

Kei tilted her head, turning around from the cooking array. "Party? What's this? This is the first thing I've heard of this."

"Uh, yeah?" Yomi narrowed her eyes. "Remember, we have a deal, Mama. Only 01-Ef F8 gets to read my email, and she only tells you if it's actually important. Remember? Plus... plus, it's..." she lowered her voice, "... it's sort of an invite thing. See, Isabelle is going out with her boyfriend, and Abi got invited and she invited me and Michelle and so we're going."

Her mother sighed. "You do know that I'm going to have the Ems and Efs follow you. And you know you're not allowed alcohol, and if I find that you..." she sighed again. "You'll be with Michelle, yes?"

"Mmm hmm."

"Was that a yes?"

"Yes." Yomi gave an annoyed glare. "Yes, that was a 'yes'."

"Michelle's a sensible girl. Hmm, and I know for all her flaws, of which she has many, like being so _annoying_, and irritating, and... grr," Kei blinked, and refocused on the actual conversation, "Abi's mother keeps her daughter under control. All right. You can go, but I will have some Efs tracking you. And you should have told me earlier."

"Not like you wouldn't have some Efs following me anyway."

"Yomi, you won the argument. Don't push it."

"But... but." Yomiko swallowed. "Can they not be using humanesque morphs, okay? Especially not the slutty... the pretty," she hastily corrected herself, "sixteen year old ones. It's _really_ hard to get boys to look at you when you've got your sisters being all... all big-boobed at them. And make them wear more clothes."

"What morphs your sisters chose to use for surveillance and protection operations is entirely up to them, as I have told you before," Kei said, high-mindedly. "You know they don't feel cold, for example."

There was a 'ding' from the cooker, and Kei hefted the industrial-scale plate in one hand, draining the fat off.

"But it's creepy to have teenage boys hitting on them! And really creepy to have them hitting back at some of the older boys." Yomiko narrowed her eyes. "And girls. And that means they aren't paying attention to me!"

"What a shame."

The smell of the bacon... wafted as it was poured down onto the central trough on the table.

"Mmm."

"Mmm."

"Urgh."

"Aww, come on, Logos," Yomi said, picking up a few rinds, and waving them in front of his nose. "Are you sure you don't want some rich, tender, succulent, juicy, meaty..."

"You're dr-drooling."

"Yomiko, stop trying to lure your brother from the path of vegetarianism. He's made his choice."

"But... but it's the wrong one. Objectively speaking."

"Yes, I know, Yomi, but we're meant to respect it." Kei smiled. "That was a joke, Logos," she reassured her adopted son. "And, this way, there is more for us."

"A good point, well made," her daughter agreed, the embers of a dying fire illuminating her eyes. She stuck her tongue out at her brother. "Keep your stupid bran-stuff."

The teenage boy sighed, and turned up the volume on his headphones, as mother and daughter unhinged their jaws and began the ravening.

* * *

...

* * *

The morning air was clear, but chill, as the car rolled out of the garage in the Nagisa Estate. The passengers of the car were as follows; one (1) blue-grey haired, red-eyed, thirteen-year old girl, one (1) grey-brown haired, red-brown eyed, seventeen year old boy, one (1) cybernetic killing machine body double for aforementioned girl currently occupied by Keiworu intelligence 01-Ef Z1, one (1) cybernetic killing machine body double for aforementioned boy currently occupied by Keiworu intelligence 01-Em W3, one (1) blue haired, red-eyed mother, whether biological, adoptive, or neurological, for all these children.

An observant onlooker might have noted that it lacked a driver. And that small laser defences mounted in the windscreen wipers were eliminating insects before they could make a mess on the bodywork.

The white unicorns that were cropping the grass were not observant onlookers. Their genetics had only been tweaked from their horse-parents for things like 'horniness' and 'shiny white coats', not 'inteligence'. They had been a rather enthusiastic school project for Yomiko, when she had been younger. Her teacher had alleged that she had just got her mother to do it for her, to which the answer had been "Well...yes. But she qualified for co-author on the peer-reviewed paper I have here. Doesn't that count for something?"

It had counted for something, and she had been given a 10/10, and a shiny gold sticker, which had made the 5-year old very happy.

And the unicorns were enjoying the fact that the girl that they had been designed for was now 13, and thus rather less obsessive about them. It had not been pleasant for them, because Yomiko tended to disturb natural wildlife. And unnatural wildlife; Raphael, her pet Israfim, was the only one of its kind within three kilometres of the estate, and that was largely because he was too jaded, cynical, and, to be frank, alcoholic to be put off by a mere discomfiting feeling, when he had a place which was warm, safe, and full of food he could steal.

The car stopped for a moment, and the aforementioned blue-grey haired girl left a trail of dust behind her as she sprinted back to the house, to grab a work book from her room, before returning just as rapidly. An unhelpful, stammering comment was made by the boy, and the mother separated the two, while their cybernetic killing machine body doubles looked on, placidly.

The school run was a daily trial.

* * *

...

* * *

"Bye, Mama!" Yomi called, as she clambered out of the car, after her brother and their cybernetic body doubles, turning back around to face her mother. "See you... Sunday, maybe?"

Kei winced. "I'd like to keep it only one night," she said. "But, yes, there's a chance that it might be longer. Do what the Ems and Efs say while I'm away, and I'd like you to get any homework you get given done on Saturday, too, because I think we might want to do something on Sunday, especially if your father's back from the conference at LUNA."

"Maybe," Yomi said, with a shrug. She sighed. "And I promise that I won't do anything silly at the party or stuff and you know that Michelle's mum puts a curfew on her so you'll hear if we're back late."

"Be good," her mother said, in a warning tone. "And you know how you react to alcohol..."

The girl shuddered.

"... so we won't be making that mistake again, will we?"

"I certainly won't," Yomiko agreed, wholeheartedly.

"I could tell you 'I told you so'."

"You _did_. Repeatedly."

Kei Nagisa smirked. "Are you going to give your old mother a kiss goodbye?" she suggested.

"I wasn't planning to, no."

"Awww."

Yomiko sighed. "Would a hug be acceptable?" she said, grudgingly.

"Yes. It would be pleasing."

Mother and daughter embraced.

"God, you're such a child sometimes."

"And you're just like me, aren't you Yomi?"

"No!" The girl refocused on her mother, and noticed the still-present smirk. "Oh, ha ha. You're a bad mother, given how much you seem to like winding me up." She flapped her hands at Kei. "Go on, go. Bye, Mama. Shoo."

There was a chuckle, as the door closed and the car drove off. Yomiko shook her head, and turned around, almost walking into her body double. "Ooops."

"It's fine," 01-Ef Z1 said, in her own voice. "Come on, 00-Ef PHYS0. You don't want to be late."

Internally, the girl sighed. It was a way of her brothers and sisters treating her as one of them, she supposed, but... well, it wasn't as if she had so many biological brothers and sisters that she needed to be distinguished from them. Plus, because her father was so _embarrassing_, he seemed to think it was a cute little nickname. Now, it wouldn't be so bad if she actually had a little sister, to force the distinction, but, no. The blue-grey haired girl shook her head, and scanned the entrance area to the Gymnasium, past the thick iron gates. And then she grinned.

"Come on, Logos," she said, grabbing her older brother's hand and yanking him away from the place where he was trying to sum up the courage to help a seventeen-year old blonde girl who was manhandling a double bass into school, "don't dawdle."

"B-b-but..." the boy began, the faint sparkle around him dissipating as he was pulled along by the engine of little-sisterness, before he gave up.

"School is _inside_ the gates, remember?"

He said nothing, and glowered at Yomiko; an expression which had absolutely no effect, as she wasn't actually looking at him. She did let go of his hand, however, but that was merely because she had seen two other girls of her age, and instead bore inexorably over to them.

"Abi! Miche!"

* * *

...

* * *

We now move on to Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

Exhibit A: Abigael Sara Meder  
Official status: Best friend  
Attitude of mother to Yomiko's mother: Mutual archnemesis when it comes to anything school-related.  
Species: Human.  
Age: 12  
Hair colour: Reddish-blonde.  
Eye colour: Green.  
Height: 168cm  
Allergies: Bee stings  
Number of times kidnapped because of friendship with Yomiko: 1  
Favourite colour: A sort of greenish-bluish which is explicitly not turquoise. But with pink spots on it.  
Chosen weapon: Combat baton, as trained by her mother.  
Unusual traits or abilities: Cannot roll her tongue. Is red-green colourblind. Has perfect pitch.

Exhibit B: Michelle Ana Kanonier  
Official status: Bestest Best Friend  
Attitude of mother to Yomiko's mother: Complete-opposition-to-her-fundamental-principles-even-if-they-actually-get-on-quite-well-as-women.  
Species: Human.  
Age: 13  
Hair colour: Blonde  
Eye colour: Blue-grey  
Height: 147cm  
Allergies: Stupidity. And also peanuts.  
Number of times kidnapped because of friendship with Yomiko: 158  
Number of times kidnapped because of friendship with Yomiko (not by Yomiko): 29  
Number of times kidnapped because of friendship with Yomiko (not by Yomiko or Abigael): 1  
Favourite colour: Black. Until they come up with something darker.  
Chosen weapon: Kicks to the crotch, or, failing that, anything else that allows a petite, blond little girl to incapacitate as fast as possible.  
Unusual traits or abilities: Would hate world, but that takes too much effort. Does ballet; as a result, can kick like a mule.

"Hey, Yomi!" Exhibit A says, perkily, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. She receives a hug in greeting, and is placated.

Exhibit B does not give anywhere near such an exuberant greeting, but instead sighs, and rolls her eyes. The impact of such a response would be greater if she had not been doing it since she was 7. It would also be greater if it stopped her from being swamped in a hug from Yomiko, who had not, after all, seen her in all of about thirteen hours, or, in fact, if she was not resigned to it.

The moral of this story, incidentally, was that one should not make friends with ADAM and Lilith's granddaughter on your first day of primary school, unless one wished for a life filled with... well, Yomiko Leliel Nagisa. Especially not on the grounds that her hair, and your eyes, are the same colour. Which is fundamentally an unsound basis for a friendship.

"Ohmygod!" Abi interjected. "Did you see _Kinder_ last night."

"No."

"It was so awesome! Ivan suffered an attack of _explosive_ amnesia!"

"You know, Abi, every time you talk about a show which I have not seen, and care nothing about, I feel the world get more and more stupid."

"I did!" Yomi interjected. "It was really cool. Especially the way his memories blew up!" Her lips pursed. "Of course, I could have done without some of the Ems and Efs getting distracting by starting a phone campaign to protest at the portrayal of AIs in the show. I wish they wouldn't tell me when they're doing it, but I couldn't find the zapper to mute their speakers."

"But Clarity-9 is so sinister! You have to have a good villain to a story, or what's the _point_?"

"Fluffy bunnies. And happy skippiness, where everything turns out just wonderful and chocolate falls from the sky and there are dramatic reconciliations which conveniently happen just before the end of the show."

"Thank _you_, Miche."

"I was being sarcastic."

"Really? Because I'd _never_ have guessed it."

"So were you then, Yomi."

"No. _Really_?"

"And again."

* * *

...

* * *

"Now, the quoted extract starts up again, as a means of play-interplay which interweaves through the narrative in an adversarial manner, designed to counterpoint the overall message of the work, in a classical example of the _advocatus diabolic_. It is mystical where the broader story is pragmatic in its description of life in the occupation, it is nostalgic even as Hanna describes the horror of her use of combat synthorgs against conventional forces, and it only truly coincides with the greater recount when LUNA... though, of course, this was not LUNA, this was the old UN, and it was this event which forced the change... forces are finally mobilised after passing the UN Assembly, and deployed to bring an end to the occupation of the capital of the US, and she faces the horror of opposing the Mass Production Series. As it is put, '_Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich._' and she quotes this, specifically 'schrecklich' as to convey both religious awe as well as terror, as well as, of course, the connotations of 'Engel'." The man adjusted his glowing glasses, and stared down at the class of teenage students. "Now, this text, as perhaps the only example of writings from the point of view of one of the sythorg pilots involved in the coup, is vital in understanding the context of much of the work from the later 2020s, as well..." he sneered, "... as well as spawning a legion of imitators, many of whom miss the point completely that Hanna and her fellow pilots were operating under orders born of misplaced nationalism... and that the Angelic-improved ZEUS series were only a tool of the rebellious American regionalists, as she herself spends most of the latter quarter of the book explaining, that she was only a pawn." He waved a hand again, and adjusted his glasses, looking around the class. "Hmm... _Frau_ Nagisa, please read the poetry extract on the current page."

The girl stood up, tilting her head slightly. "From line 11?" she asked.

"Correct, yes." He stared at her. "And as written. Without commentary."

Yomiko cleared her throat, and resisted the urge which suddenly welled up to do the opposite of what he said. "Each vague turn of the world has such disinherited ones," she began. "To whom the former does not, and the next does not yet, belong.  
Since even the next is far from mankind. Though  
this should not confuse us, but strengthen in us the keeping  
of still recognisable forms. This once stood among men,  
stood in the midst of fate, the destroyer, stood  
in the midst of not-knowing-towards-what, as if it existed, and drew  
stars towards itself out of the enshrined heavens."

Her hand hovered over the button on the side of her screen. "Do you want me to continue?" Yomiko asked, her expression held rigid.

"No, thank you," he told the girl, who sat down. The German teacher paused, and bought up a new display on the front board. "So, can someone..."

A hand shot up. A hand belonging to a girl who had just sat down.

"... who is _not_ Frau Nagisa explain the original nature and context of this poetry to me, and how this applies to the 2024 failed coup and the main, autobiographical nature of the text?"

* * *

...

* * *

"Urgh." Abigael let her head slump onto her hands. "I hate German Literature so much. He's just... damn it, we're 13! I don't care about it, and I don't want to have to do stuff about 'what the poetry really means', blah blah. If he wants to go teach degree-level stuff so much, he should go do it. We're only a second-year class." She let out a sigh. "And my mum's getting on my back about my lit marks this year. Well, and last year. And... um, how I almost failed the language test to even get into this place." She stuck her hands into her pockets. "It would have sucked if I hadn't got into this Gymnasium, and had to go to a Realschule. I couldn't have stayed with you!" She paused. "Oh, and my mum would have killed me dead. That would have sucked, too."

"Yep," Michelle said, flipping her pencil case around her wrist and catching it.

"So..."

"Abi." Yomiko sighed. "You know you can't get away with copying my homework. They can recognise my style, remember?"

Abigael pouted. "Yep. I dunno how they do that."

"Maybe because Yomi cites references in _everything_," Michelle stated, acerbically. "Or maybe the morass of polysyllables? Or the fact that, Abi... you've never thought the words 'the use of biblical imagery against the... something something metaphor metaphor open square brackets three close square brackets' ... in your _life_."

"Nope," the other girl replied cheerfully. "But... Yooo~ooomi..."

Yomiko sighed. "Look, I'll put you in touch with 01-Em AE3 again," she said, reluctantly. "But only for tutoring, right? Plus, you know, no getting crushes. I'll get Mama to make him use an ugly avatar if I have to."

As the three of them had entered the rocky waters of puberty, filled with unexpected growths, odd hormones, the horrors of menstruation, and in Yomiko's case, uncontrolled sparkling, there had been a deal that people's brothers and sisters were off-limits. Michelle had pointed out that she was losing out from this, because she only had The Brat, who was 7 years younger than her, and annoying, while the other two had attractive older brothers, but she was held in a headlock by Abi until she agreed that, yes, people's siblings were invalid targets. And peace was restored to the kingdom.

"Anyway, why don't you ask me for help?" Michelle said, sounding slightly hurt.

"Because you'd just be all sarcastic at me."

"Well, yes. But, after that, then I'd help!"

"... well, thanks, Miche. I mean, I do~oo~oo have a question about some maths things, and since you're volunteering..."

"Wonderful." The girl sighed. "What maths things do you want to copy?"

Yomi frowned. "I don't think Abi really want to copy," she said, disapproval in her voice. "She want you to help explain them."

"Nope! Copying is good with me!" the red-blonde girl said.

Well, peace was restored to the democratic federal republic.

* * *

...

* * *

And soon it was lunchtime, and three girls sat on the roof of one of the more modern buildings, looking out over the playing fields, legs dangling over the edge, through the railings. The chorus of Yomiko consuming a notable fraction of her own body mass was, as always, present.

Growth spurts were hard work, and required her to increase her already prodigious calorie intake.

"So, I was thinking," Abigael began, to provide a counterpoint to the eating, "...right. What do you think life is like in the Southern Hemisphere, where all the seasons are the wrong way around?"

Michelle shrugged. "Probably just the same as here," she said. "Why'd it be different?"

"Well, for one, it'd be snowy in summer, and summery at Christmas. That'd be different."

"I suppose."

"But... um, hmm. I mean, I bet it's a lot different in Africa than Australia, say. I mean, Africa has Christmas, while Australia doesn't. I bet that's really different."

"Don't be silly," the blonde said, staring down at the fields. "Everywhere has Christmas."

"Australia doesn't. Not as a religious thing, I think. It's just like a day. 'Cause, you know, it's like a theocracy or something."

"Uh, no." Michelle shook her head. "I'm sure you're wrong."

"Am not."

"Can't be bothered to say 'are too!' Go check it on Wikipedia, if you like."

"I will, too!"

There was a noise from Yomiko, as she tried to say something around a mouthful of cheese.

"What was that, Yomi?" asked Abi.

The blue-grey haired girl swallowed. "I said, isn't it like a military dictatorship?"

It was at that moment that Yomiko's phone started to vibrate. She checked it, raising her eyebrows. "Okay. Um... apparently it's a LUNA Special Protected Territory. And not a military dictatorship or theocracy. Although the dominant religion is apparently..." Yomi sighed, and put her phone away. "I wish the Ems and Efs wouldn't listen in like this," she said. "Mama told me that you weren't going to listen, but obviously you did, so... yeah. I'm taking the batteries out," she told the phone.

It began to vibrate, just before it cut off from lack of power.

A sly smile crept across the girl's face. "And, now that we're alone, I'd like to mention... you know the party tonight? Well, we're going to be leaving earlier. Both Mama and Dad are away, so I know what we're going to do. We'll need to get some stuff from your house before, though, Abi."

Michelle raised her hand, in a desultory half-gesture. "Are we going to end up kidnapped because of this?" she asked, laconically.

"No."

"Are we going to get in trouble?"

"Not if it goes according to plan."

"Ah. Good. We're going to get into trouble."

"So, what're we gonna be doing?" Abi asked brightly.

"We're going to have so much fun at the party," Yomi said, with a shrug and a smirk. "And we should get to see some rather new stuff, and maybe get some presents to keep from it."

"Euggghh... I don't _know_, Yomi. Aren't we... isn't it a bit... I know my mum would sort of kill any boy I messed around with properly, or at the very least break some of his bones. And..." she dropped her voice, "... I mean, have you found someone? Why are we going to join you... I mean, we do sort of share everything, but..."

Michelle clipped her over the back of the head.

"Thanks, Miche. Not in that way, Abi. Explain later."

* * *

...

* * *

"... and so, for example, x to the power of one half means 'the square root of x'. Think of it as the opposite of the normal square; just as multiplication is the opposite of division."

Abigael leant forwards, and poked Yomiko in the back. "Is it later yet?" she whispered.

"No, Abi. It's not 'later' yet."

"Hey. Shut up," hissed one of the boys next to Abi.

Yomi's eyes flashed momentarily, and she turned to stare, with narrowed gaze, at him. "Do you want to make something of it?" she said, picking each word carefully. "Mister September."

The boy recoiled, flinching under the almost palpable force of the stare. And the hate. "N-n-no," he muttered back.

"Good." Yomi turned back around, nostrils flaring. "Good."

* * *

...

* * *

"Is it later yet?"

"Abi, just get your bike unchained, and we can ride back," Michelle said, with a sigh, as she wheeled her own one out.

Yomiko looked up, from where she was tying up the laces on her running shoes. She was made to wear them for these purposes, because she tended to get through shoes rather quickly normally, as for some reason school shoes were not designed for the levels of percussive friction she inflicted on them. "And, no, it's not 'later' yet," she added.

* * *

...

* * *

"Later? Now?"

Yomi grabbed the bag that she had stashed at the back of Abigael's cupboard thirteen months ago. "Not quite. Make sure you have warm clothing, anything you think you'd need for a day elsewhere, and your passports. Miche, you've still got those anonymised phones?"

The blonde snorted. "It's not like Mum doesn't always keep them around. And, yes, before you ask, yes, I have the false IDs."

"Wait, when did you put that in there?" Abigael asked, who was getting slightly lost.

"I asked you, remember? 'Abi-can-I-keep-something-in-your-cupboard?'."

"... um, no?"

Michelle sighed. "Oh yeah. Abi, Yomi used your eBay account for some things, remember, and paid you back."

"With interest!" the blue-grey haired girl added.

"Why won't anyone tell me what's going on!" Abigael protested.

There was a knock at her door, and all three girls immediately straightened up, scattering the bags around normally. In the time that it took for the door to open, anything which might have been deemed to be suspect had been obscured, and the cosmetics had come out.

"Who's not telling someone something?" Abigael's mother, a tall, well-built woman with hair the same colour as her daughter's, asked.

"Michelle has a secret," Yomiko said, gazing up with large, red, suddenly puppy-like eyes. "She doesn't want _anyone_ to find out."

"Do not," muttered the other girl.

"How cute," Delia Meder said, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Abigael, I'm taking Christine to ballet practice. If you want dinner, it's going to be at six."

Abi shrugged. "We just stopped in to get some stuff, and me to get changed" she said. "We're off to Miche's next." She suddenly paused. "I did tell you about the party, remember?"

Her mother stiffened for a moment. "Yes," she said, eventually. "You did. How much homework do you have?"

"Oh, hardly any." Abi took a breath. "Um... two pieces of Maths, German Literature, and we have to find a piece of text in English on the internet and translate it."

"Hmm."

"I'll get it done, really!" The green-eyed girl looked up at her mother. "Really really. And I didn't go to the party last week because you said I couldn't go because I had a German essay to do, so I didn't, and you did say I could go to this one."

"Abigael, don't whinge." Mrs Meder narrowed her eyes. "You are not to drink, understand. I will expect you to be back by 11pm..."

"... I'll be going back to Miche's."

"... then I will phone her mother to make sure. You are to make sure that you have your self-defence equipment, and if you have any trouble from anyone, you are to phone me."

Abi slumped down. "Yes, Mama," she said, voice softer.

The woman nodded once. "Good," she said. "Well, I will see you tomorrow, when you will make a start on your homework, and get it done, because you have an athletics meet on Sunday, remember?"

"Mmm hmm."

Delia closed the door behind her, which allowed Abigael to slump down, putting her head in her hands. "Urgh," she groaned.

"Don't worry," Yomi said, giving her a hug. "It'll be fine. Especially when you see what I have planned."

"That's not 'kay, Yomi." The red-blonde girl balled her hands into fists. "I... you don't have to put up with parents being so... so domineering!"

"Mama has me followed by my AI brothers and sisters at all times, and she's going to have them there at the party in avatar bodies, where they'll probably end up distracting all the cute boys," Yomiko said, flatly. "And too many girls I know have crushes on my brothers."

"Yeah, some of the Ems are pretty cute," Michelle said, idly. "As is Logos, when you know, you haven't actually tried to talk to him. And my mum pretty much lets me do what I like."

"Not helping, Miche." Yomi looked down, concern in her eyes. "You 'kay, Abi?"

The other girl shrugged. "Let's just go over to Miche's."

"It will be 'later' there," Yomiko said, reassuringly.

* * *

...

* * *

"Mum," Michelle yelled, sticking her head into the room, lit only by the masses of hexagonal screens, "the Brat's in my room again!"

Her mother, who was just as tiny and blonde as her daughter, turned around, peering through her orange data-glasses. "Well, tell him to get out," she said, before turning around back to the screens.

"I _did_! Why can't he just keep out of it! It's not his room. And I have Abi and Yomi 'round, and he's being _stupid_."

The woman sighed. "You know, if you just asked nicely, rather than just yelling at him, then..."

"But he is The Brat. I have to call him by his name."

"That's not a constructive attitude. And I am trying to work on a paper, but..." she leveraged herself out of her chair.

Michelle shrugged. "Never mind. Look... I'll try to sort it out peacefully, okay."

Ms Kanonier beamed at her daughter. "Good girl."

"But, um, mum? Can I have some blank dummy cards, please?" Michelle said, stepping further into the room, to make herself heard over the whir of fans and the gurgling of the coolant systems.

"They're in the normal place," her mother said, distracted. "I sent you the latest update programme for uploading new data, yes?"

"Yep, mum."

"Michelle," Ms Kanonier sighed. "You should try to get on better with your brother."

"Not a proper brother," the girl muttered, before, saying, in a louder voice. "Yes, of course, mum."

* * *

...

* * *

Yomiko picked up the seven-year old boy by his ankles, and placed him down outside the room, trivially avoiding the attempts to bite and punch.

"See, Brat," Michelle said, with a twitch, "that's how to resolve things peacefully. You keep out of my room. Or next time, I'll get Yomi to drop you on your head." She sniffed. "Not that that would do anything."

The door was slammed in his face.

Michelle's room was a mix of technology and semi-constructed computer systems, kludged into something which filled most of a wall. The purple-painted walls were covered in posters.

Yomiko stepped over to the window, and lowered the silvery mesh blind. "Okay, I think it's now later-o-clock," she said. "You still got the Cage fitted in your room?" she asked.

"Huh," was the response of the owner of the room, who was shedding her school clothes and pulling on a dark-red T-shirt and black leggings, even as she booted up her computer. "Like mum would let me get away without it. She's too afraid that 'the Ophelia Initiative'," she rolled her eyes, "will find a way to download AIs straight into people's heads."

"Oooh!"

"Basically," Yomi said, "...well. Dad's still at LUNA, Mama's away in the US, and it's a Friday. So we're going on an adventure."

Abigael grinned broadly. "Yes! Something _fun_ for once! Where to? Where to?"

A smirk crept onto the blue-grey haired girl's lips. "Tokyo-3," she said.

There was silence.

"As in... _the_ Tokyo-3?"

"Yes."

Michelle sighed. "How long have you been planning this, Yomi?" she asked.

"Me? Plan it? It's just a happy... about three months after my 10th birthday," she admitted. "See... well, after Mama explained her history, I was... curious. And Miche, well, your mama is all 'Information must be free' and stuff, so I got to have a _proper_ look for stuff on your home computers without Mama or the Ems and Efs finding out."

"Yay!" Abigael clutched her hands together. "Family reunion!"

"No!" Yomi crossed her arms, looking vaguely shocked. "I don't want that! Reason one; these are people who kept Mama in a tank until she was 16. Reason two," she continued, turning red, eyes glowing, "these are people who _made that calendar!_ Reason three; these are..."

"Yomi," Michelle said, leaning back on her chair. "If you're going to spark, do it away from my stuff."

The girl blinked. "Ooops," she said, combing her fingers through her hair, collecting a palmful of globules of light, before crushing it. "But, yes. I _don't_ want to meet up with them. But..." and she trailed off.

"Toyko-3 is meant to be an awesome place," Abigael completed for her. "So that's why you've been getting me to horde yen; for buying stuff while there." Her eyes widened. "You know T3 has the world's largest stocker of manga? All in one building?"

"Yep. And... well, it was where most of the Angel War was fought. I just want to be able to _see_ some of the places. I mean, for one, Daddy killed Matariel, and Uncle Uri did a lot of stuff, like even killing Zeruel, and..." she folded her arms again. "Look, I just want to see. It'll be easy. We go to the party, we come home early, and then, because of the time difference, we can go to Japan in the middle of the night, spend some hours there, and then we jump back. Mama and Daddy are away, so they won't feel it, and no-one knows what we're doing. No-one will ever know, you know."

"Ah, yes."

Michelle swung back around on her chair, legs crossed. "Apart from the fact that, Yomi, you're very distinctive looking. Come on, you stick out like a sore thumb in a crowd. People'll see that, oooh, there's a strange red-eyed, blue haired girl walking around, and then they'll find out and we'll all get in trouble." She paused. "Well, you two will," she corrected herself.

"Aha!" Yomi punched one fist into the air. "But, you see, I've done my research. I have a _cunning disguise_," she said, undoing the buttons on her blouse, dumping it down onto the floor.

"Yomi, I doubt that Tokyo-3 is entirely guarded by teenage boys," Michelle said, slumping back with a sigh. "Taking off your shirt probably won't help." She sniffed. "Especially since you're still even flatter than me, and I'm no Isabelle. If your cunning plan involves nudity... it's not a very cunning one."

She received a level, red stare for that. "I'm... I'm having a growth spurt right now, okay," Yomiko said, flushing pink. "I'm going to get curvier when I actually can put on some fat. Stupid short curvy high-metabolism Mama. And I'm getting a T-shirt out, okay? Not just taking my clothes off."

"Really."

"Miche, it's in my hand. And now..." there was a small pause, as the girl tried to put both arms through one sleeve, and fought for a bit to actually get it to sit straight, "... and now it's on." The blue-grey haired girl pulled the diamond pins out of her bob, running her hands through her hair, until it hung more naturally. "Now, see!"

Hands on hips, she presented herself, now in a white T-shirt. The words "GOT A PROBLEM! DROP THE SUN ON IT!" were emblazoned on it, in pale blue, along with a red, stylised eye-shape.

"Oooh, that's actually kinda pretty, Yomi," Abigael said, eyes lighting up. "It's the same length as your bangs. I dunno why you always like to keep it in that bob, when it's prettier like that."

"I don't think so," Yomi said with a shrug. "But I was..."

"Because it makes you look more like your mum," Michelle said, flatly.

"Well, when you put it like that... look, can we go talk about the disguise, okay?"

The other two girls stared at it.

"You haven't changed your hair colour or your eyes," Michelle said, critically.

"Yep. I mean, it's all pretty and all, but, Yomi, it's not really a disguise. It's more like... letting your hair down and putting on a new T-shirt."

Yomiko put on a hurt expression on her face. "But... but... but, I... I _worked so hard_ on this! I dyed my hair blue, even though my Mama told me I couldn't, and... and I even found red contact lenses that _matched!_" The last word was almost wailed.

There was a pause.

"Yomi." The petite blonde sighed. "You didn't. Those're your natural colours."

"Exactly." The grin was smug. "I'm disguised as a _fangirl_, Miche. That's why I had to borrow your computer a few times, Abi."

"Uh... when did you do that?"

"I asked you. About... um... two years ago. Yeah," Yomiko Nagisa said, looking slightly disturbed, "there was a weird number of fanboys and fangirls about my relatives. And," the expression turned to nausea, "... gods, the fan-art. Urgh. I mean, I'd had the Talk already, but... yuck. Yuck yuck yuck."

"Oooh! Let's see!" Abigael said brightly, pulling out her touchscreen, and pulling up an image search engine. "Hmm... 'Ayanami fanart'."

"**Abi. Put down the touchscreen, and step away from it. Do not press enter whatever you do.**"

"Nuh uh, don't get reverby on me, Yomi, I'm just..." she shrieked, and dropped it. "Urgh!"

"Yah! I know!"

"But that looked like your mum. Like... several of your mum. All... doing things. And then were was the things that looked like your dad, your dad with red hair, and some other man with brown hair and..."

"I. Know." Yomi shivered. "There. Are. Sick. People. Out. There." Her face darkened. "Including some of them. People who look like your mama shouldn't be allowed to make nude calendars."

"... it was kinda hot," Abi muttered, reaching out for the touchscreen again, before a glowing orange wall pushed her back, and Yomiko grabbed the device with a shudder.

"That's my dad and uncle! And there are... there _still_ are people out there drawing... **sick, sick** things involving my family, even if I don't know them, but... genetically identically, and... argh! Argh argh! Argh!"

"Well, that was fun," Michelle said, in a drawl. "Really. But perhaps we could get away from the 'traumatising Yomi' bit, and back to the planning bit? Pass me the touchscreen, please, I need to make some notes."

"Yomi is already traumatised, thank you every much, but yes. Please," the pale girl, paler than usual said, handing the device over.

"So," Michelle shrugged, flicking a lock of blonde hair back. "Are you really sure that the disguise will work?"

"Well, the other option I was considering was to see if I could get some brown hair dye, and some normal coloured contacts... green probably, because I like green, and just go as a normal person, but there was no way that Mama wouldn't notice that, and there's the whole 'I don't want her to find out' thing."

"I couldn't see you with normal eyes and hair," Abi agreed, tilting her head slightly. "It just looks _wrong_."

Michelle cocked her head slightly, as she thumbed down the screen. "Wait a moment, Abi?" she said, narrowing her eyes. "Why do you have SafeSearch off."

"Heh. Well, it's not like Mum's good enough with computers to stop me turning it off, is it?" Anything else she would have said was obscured by the pink T-shirt which landed on her head. "Huh? What's this?" she asked, pulling it off and staring at it.

Yomi shrugged. "Well, you've got reddish-blonde hair, so your disguise was pretty easy. I also got you a hair band," she added, tossing one with two pink barnettes attached to it.

"Cool!" Abigael pulled off her own blouse, and smoothed out the pink T-shirt, which was patterned in a way which resembled a plug suit. "This is really comfy," she added. "And..." she peered in the mirror, "... wow. These bump-things on the hairband actually work really well with my hair."

The blue-grey haired girl smirked, and then turned to face her other friend.

Michelle stared back. "No," she said, flatly.

"Awww. Come on, Miche. Don't be a spoilsport."

"Only one of us is the one with the blue hair and red eyes, Yomi. And it's not me. Or Abi. I don't _need_ to dress up. And neither does Abi." She glanced over at the other girl. "She just does it because she likes free T-shirts."

Yomi pouted. "But I went and got you one in blue!"

"I hate blue."

"You hate every colour that isn't black. And a few shades of very dark red."

"Correct," Michelle said with a nod. "And that blue is sickening."

"Hey! It's almost the colour my hair was when I was younger!"

"So? I don't want to wear your hair."

"Yeah, we gotta save that for when we experiment with girls in about a few years time," Abigael interjected, with a grin.

She was glared at, and then ignored.

"_Fine!_" Yomi said, petulantly. "Just have the glasses, then." She harrumphed.

"Almost anything is better than baby blue," Michelle said, as she put on the horn-rimmed glasses, and peered at herself in the mirror.

"So, yes. You know what we're doing, overall?" Yomiko asked. "We go to the party, we leave early, we get Miche's mum to tell our parents that we're home, and then I'll 'port us to Tokyo-3 so that we'll be there at 8am, their time. We set our watches so we know how long we have. We head back for 7am, German time, so your mama won't notice us missing. It's perfect."

"You can leave it for 9 am," Michelle informed her, a glint of interest in her eyes. "I'll lock my door, and neither Mum nor the Brat will be up that early on a Saturday."

"Even better," Yomi agreed. "So, yes. Excellent plan, or awesome plan? This is going to be so much fun!"

* * *

...


	3. 2: The Girls Hit Tokyo3

**6th of March, 2038**

The morning sun shone down on the steel and glass canyons of Tokyo-3, as it rose above the mountains. Its light reflected off the city almost as much as off the lake besides it, and indeed, now the two were becoming indistinguishable, for structures rose from the depths, connected by sky-bridges, in a way that put ancient Tenochtitlan to shame and which covered most of the surface area of the water with floating gardens.

From the point of view of Shinji Ikari-Soryu, however, out in his Saturday morning jog, this was not only commonplace, this was meaningless. This shining mass was all to the south of him, and the area in which he lived was far more human-scaled, and in his opinion, far more liveable. The man, slightly red in the face, reached up, and tucked a strand of dark hair back, now shot with grey at the temples, before taking a drag from his water bottle. One hand went to his chest. Rain was coming, he could feel, from the ache there. Not right now, but... soon.

Sighing, he continued his run. Continued, that is, until his flatscreen went off in his pocket, and he came to a halt again. The man frowned as he noted who the call was from.

"Hello," he answered into his headset. "What is it, Ichi?"

The voice of his sister was crisp, and a little worried, from the other end of the line. "Shinji. Um... listen. Take care, 'kay?"

The man frowned, his face settling in familiar creases. "What do you mean?" He blinked, and leant against a convenient nearby wall. "You know the whole 'following the steps of conversation all the way through' thing?" he added, rhetorically. "You're not doing it."

There was a sigh. "I mean exactly that. Take care. We... there's just... listen. The sensors just went all crazy 'bout a massive Pattern Blue, and then it vanished."

"A what?"

"We don't know! It was incredibly brief, and Dr Ibuki is hoping it was a sensor fluctuation and we don't have enough data to go on and... and it saturated the grid, so we can't even tell where it came from... but, just, take care. Watch out for anything odd."

Shinji Ikari-Soryu looked away from the conversation with his Evangelion sister, and up at the nearest blue-flowered tree, and at the israfim that were swinging through it. A bit of his brain he didn't use much raised the question of what, exactly, counted as 'odd' for him. He didn't say it out loud, of course. "I should get home," he said, after a moment's thought. "Asuka's going to need to get in, and that means that I'll need to look after..."

"She's already left with Ari," Ichi replied, drily. "So, don't worry. You can keep on with your run, exercising those stubby little legs of yours."

He snorted, despite the spectre of old worries. "Okay. Talk to you later, Ichi."

She cut the line without saying goodbye, and Shinji sighed, pinching his brow, staring down at his watch as he thought. Ichi really seemed worried, he thought. This was... odd.

He looked up again. A girl on the other side of the street met his gaze. Alert red eyes, under a darker, greyish-blue haircut, fastened on him. Two other girls were with her; a tall, reddish-blonde girl with a pink A10 Clip hairband and matching plug-suit T-shirt, and a shorter one with what looked like a pair of Mari's glasses. He could hear the babble of German, recognise the language even if he couldn't understand it.

"Ich denke, wir sind verloren. Gib mir die Karte!"

"Nuh uh! Verwenden Sie Ihr eigenes Telefon, Michelle!"

"Na, dann. Yomiko, sollten Sie vielleicht nach dem Weg fragen. Fragen Sie die Menschen wie auf Tokyo-3 zu bekommen."

And his eyes widened in recognition.

_Oh no. No, no, no._

He had dreaded this. Feared this. And yet knew, every day, that it was an eternal risk.

_Fangirls._

Now they were going to notice him, and he was probably going to have to deal with mangled Japanese as they tried to get his autograph, and they'd want to take their picture with him, and it was going to ruin his morning jog completely.

There was a thud, a clatter and wild shrieking at the other end of the street, and he turned, to stare as three feral Israfim fled, knocking over the bin as they went. Sadly, he shook his head, watching as one turned around, to drag what looked like a carton of milk from the scattered rubbish, before the other two grabbed it, and dragged the ape-like creature away. Some people just didn't make their bins Israfim-proof, and that was just irresponsible, he thought. The damn things could get into almost anything that wasn't locked against them.

Shinji Ikari-Soryu looked back, but the three fangirls seemed to have gone. He sighed, and resumed his jog, somewhat pleased that he had dodged a bullet there.

* * *

...

**

* * *

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: The Yomiko Absolution**

**Chapter 2: The Girls Hit Tokyo-3**

* * *

...

* * *

The milkshake bar was filled with noise, and through the window, the packed streets of Tokyo-3 were filled with the early-morning rush. There was certainly enough noise for the girls to converse, especially when they did so in German, while they waited.

"Can't believe you _missed_ a city," Michelle said, for the sixth time, her fingers beating out a rhythm of annoyance on the table.

Yomiko sighed. "Look, Michelle," she said, finally snapping, "when you can tear open the fabric of spacetime and step through that place on your own, then you can criticise me for missing the target by a _few_ kilometres." The girl paused. "Also, the map was wrong. And I wanted to look around the outskirts of the city. And make sure we didn't jump into the middle of a crowded area. So... yep, it was actually deliberate."

"Mmm hmm."

"It was!"

"Yes. Sure it was."

"Stop being like that!"

"Well, next time you miss by a few kilometres, try not to dump us in mid air."

"Oi!" The blue-grey haired girl looked offended. "That's actually the much safer option!"

"Yomi." The blonde's gaze was level. "I can't fly. I don't want to fall to my screaming death."

"I caught us, didn't I? And would you rather have been stuck underground? I'm not used to intercontinental jumps, remember?" She blinked. "What's taking Abi so long, anyway?"

There was a pause, and a sudden, synchronised groan.

"Why did we tell Abi to get the milkshakes?" Michelle asked rhetorically, holding her head in her hands. "The one who _barely speaks any Japanese at all?_"

* * *

...

* * *

"_Kónnichi wa!_ I want _zwei_," two fingers were raised, "chocolate-chan _und_ milk-stuffs, _und_ one... _ichi_... one chocolate-chan _und Speck gewürzt_, person-chan!"

There was perplexed silence from the person who was taking the orders, at the rapid, enthusiastic, and rather incoherent mix of Japanese, German and English which had spewed forth from the reddish-blonde girl. There was a shrug, and the middle-aged woman, smiling at Abigael, called for someone who could understand Touristese.

"Abi," Yomiko sighed, from directly behind her.

The reddish-blonde girl shrugged, with a slightly sheepish grin. "Well, you know. I put in as much Japanese as I could, and... lots of people speak English, so I used that too, and that should be more than enough, right? Plus, I used fingers, and everyone can count."

There was a nod from Yomiko to the younger waiter who was now coming up, and a quick babble of perfect Japanese.

Abigael pouted slightly. "Come on, Yomi," she whinged. "I'm trying to practice and get better at it! I mean, I've been trying! And we _all_ know that you find languages easy. Like... really easy."

"Yes," the bluenette said, smugly.

"But... let me have a chance, 'kay?"

Yomiko glanced up at the electric lighting, and then down again. "Okaa~aaay," she said, obviously hesitant. "Just... not when you're getting food for us, okay? I'm getting hungry, and..."

"... you're always hungry," Michelle added.

"It's genetic! I have a fast metabolism! And you're meant to be keeping our seats, not sneaking up behind me to be sardonic about things I can't help!"

* * *

...

* * *

Their seats were not kept. And so the three girls ventured forth from the local branch of Irikuwa's, into the Tokyo-3 morning.

"... these are really good," Abigael remarked, with a flick of her hair and a loud slurp of her milkshake. "I mean... actually surprisingly good."

Yomiko's voice was quiet, when she spoke. "I can't believe that there is another place in the world that appreciates the _wonder_ which is the mint, bacon, steak, chocolate, bacon, crushed sugar cane, bacon, bacon and lard milkshake." She hefted her roughly head-sized cup in one hand. "In that exact combination, too."

"Neither can I," Michelle said, her voice flat. "Yomi, remember you're meant to be carrying that... that concoction in both hands. Because I'm pretty sure it's heavy, as well as being mostly meat and fat." She paused, and tilted her head, as chattering birds overhead. "In fact, probably _because_ it's mostly meat and fat."

"Oops." Guiltily, Yomiko shifted. "And it's _nice_!"

"I saw the way they grinned at you when you ordered that. You know they're probably expecting you to only manage... like, a few mouthfuls. Or collapse dead of a heart attack from how much fat you have in it."

"Hey, I'm being thoughtful!" Yomi protested. "Because of this, I won't have to eat for... another six hours, or so! So we won't waste time! And it's _so_ good." The last sentence was accompanied by a squeal. "A place that _understands!_"

"And the white chocolate's okay. I guess. So. Map. We have... just under seven hours left before we should be back in Germany," Michelle said, with a glance at her watch, as they stepped past a noisily chattering couple, "so we need to be prepared. Where are we going first?"

"Aha! I have a map," Yomiko said, reaching for her palmtop. She blinked. "Ooops. I just remembered. Had to leave that in your house, Miche, or the Ems and Efs would have known we'd moved."

"So we have no map." The blonde sighed. "Great work, Yomi. I really..."

"There's a map!" Abi said, brightly, pointing at an illuminated wallboard.

"What a miracle," Michelle said, her voice dead and devoid of enthusiasm, before she immediately perked up. "Okay, looking at this, the See-Squared is nearby! We _need_ to go there."

"See-Squared?" Yomi echoed.

"Oh, it's the..." there was a slight yelp from Abigael, almost exactly as if a petite blonde had stepped on her foot, "... really cool historical place. Where there's history. Of... stuff."

"There are a lot of books there," Michelle 'confirmed'.

"Hmm." Yomiko stroked her chin. "I _am_ a big fan of historical places and books."

A subtle high-five occurred behind her back.

"But there are things we should do now, in the morning, before the main tourists get there. I'll add it to my mental list, though." Yomiko grinned, and took a slurp of her drink, the reinforced straw protesting at the viscosity and pressures inflicted upon it. "Thanks for pointing it out to me." She grinned. "But that must wait! Because first we have to go to the monuments! And see the sights... we need to book a Geofront tour, and go see the Yozuyama District and get our pictures and we're gonna have so much fun."

* * *

...

* * *

"So, whatdowe think?" Abi asked, with a flick of her hair. She was in a good mood, because several other people had come up to her and complemented her on her Asuka outfit. Well, she thought they'd said that. Her Japanese was...a work in progress.

"What, in general?"

"Sure, why not."

Yomiko cleared her throat. "Well... the Garden of Fallen Crystals was beautiful. It was totally worth the biohazard checks to get in and out, because the Angelic ecosystem in there... it was beautiful." She sniffed. "It was just as well that you couldn't hear them. It wasn't just the israfim who were being rude to me."

"I really liked the transit system," Abigael said brightly. "I mean, Berlin's is good, but this? This is a whole 'nother level. Everything's so connected and cheap."

"What was up with the Other Worlds Exhibit, though?" Michelle asked, sneering slightly. "That was... odd."

"Well, you know, you always hear about other worlds," the red-blonde girl said, drumming her fingers against the railing. "I can't believe that people actually got to go to them. Oh, and we once got attacked by an evil version of one of your aunts or something, I wasn't quite clear on what happened. They really need to work on getting more things in German around here."

There was a 'harumph' from Yomiko. "Yeah, and they seem to have written Mama out of the history books."

"Don't be bitter, Yomi."

The girl sighed. "I'm not being bitter. She did tell me the truth, after all. I just didn't quite believe that they'd go _that_ far. It's like they're trying not to mention her. Well, apart from those papers talking about how she's a anti-competitive monopolist and making dirty implications about the Ems and Efs which _I_ think is _horribly_ biased against AIs and they can't help how they're born, and I'm totally going to tell my brothers and sisters so they can sue."

Michelle blinked. "Yomi, we're not meant to be here. You can't tell them."

"Oh yeah." Reaching up, the girl pulled across one of her grey-blue bangs, and stared at it intently. "Although I'm _really_ going to have to talk to some of them. Remember the Australian Embassy?"

"Yes, Yomi, _I do_."

"Miche doesn't like spiders, remember."

"I don't like spiders in dinner jackets and ties showing people around as tour guides, no!" the girl protested, her voice rising, before adding softly, "Or spiders the size of a car, no."

"Well, I saw those early pictures. I... well, I guess the 'Reego' are my cousins, but they had what I was pretty sure were two of my brothers and sisters."

"Really?"

"Abi," Yomiko sighed, "the girl looked pretty much like I did at the same age, if I'd been a gothic Lolita and had impractically long hair... which would totally get tangled up in stuff, if she wasn't virtual. Which I wasn't, thank goodness, because that's just creepy. But, yeah. Going to have to find out which ones they were; looked like a point-three and a point-seven, or so, in ratio terms."

"Huh?"

"You try having so many brothers and sisters and telling them all apart," Yomiko said, laconically. "What else? The Alaska Building?"

"The shoddy prefab concrete one?"

"... no," Michelle said, with a frown. "I don't think that was it. I...can't remember? Did we actually go there, or did we say that we were going to, and then get distracted by the World's Largest Cake?"

"That wasn't a real cake," Yomiko said, with disappointment in her voice.

"I just hope they don't find the bite-marks at the base," the blonde said, her voice dry. She shook out her hair, and the three girls turned around, to stare at the glowing, eternally falling column of water. "But the Triumph..."

It must have been three hundred metres tall. At the top, was a dark portal, a hole into the void. At the bottom, sunk into the ground, the girls could just about see another one. And between them, water fell.

Eternally.

In fact, the monument had been very carefully designed, with braking effects built into the side, and vague hints of complex machinery which was nothing more than wire-thin lines in the air. As a result, the outer layer was falling water, encasing steam, encasing something which glowed like a miniature sun. The two strands twisted around each other, so it was nothing less than a giant, glowing, double helix. There were even safety spectacles that you were meant to wear to look at it, although, of course, almost none of the onlookers were actually doing so.

"That's just... pretty," Abigael managed, and she spoke for them all.

"This memorial was built in 2020, at the site of the defeat of ADAM in 2017, by Shinji Ikari, piloting Unit 01," read Yomiko out loud from a plaque, translating for her friends. "The pilot bravely forced ADAM into the Dirac, where he has remained to this day. Pilot Ikari confronted ADAM inside the Dirac, and held off his mental assault long enough that NERV could devise a way to rescue him. The Triumph of Humanity stands as a glorious sign of what mankind can do when we are united, as we were in the darkest days of the Angel War." She cleared her throat, and smiled faintly. "That's... that's pretty cool. I... heh." The smile grew wider. "He's my uncle." She paused, and tilted her head. "Well... possibly my half-brother. I mean, if we look at it genetically." She blinked. "I probably should have stopped talking there."

"No, really?" Michelle drawled.

"That is pretty cool," Abigael said, with a grin. "Maybe you should go find him, eh? See if you can find him and talk to him. I mean, from what you've mentioned, he never did anything bad."

Yomiko stared up at the double helix of light. "You know what?" she said. "Yeah. One of the things that Mama said was that she still feels guilty about not helping. So... yes. Maybe if I could find him, I could tell him that, and... yes. Not any of her sisters, just him, because... well, in the films, he always seemed like a nice, sane person... not the comic relief or anything." She balled her hands into fists. "Argh! But I'd get into trouble if Mama found out, and she _would_! She almost always does!"

"So tell him not to tell," the blonde said, drily.  
"Not that easy, Miche." Yomiko grinned broadly. "But, still. If we get the chance, once we've got the tourist things out the way, it..." she shot a worried glance at her friends. "You wouldn't mind me dragging you off to sort of maybe break into Shinji Ikari's house and suddenly introduce myself as his niece, right?"

Abigael flicked her head. "No way! We'd get to meet Shinji Ikari!"

"I'd mind."

"So it's settled," Yomiko said, loudly. "We'll do it! What next, Miche?"

"... yes, just ignore me." The petite girl sighed. "The Memorials, and then the Angelic War Museum," she said, checking the map which Yomiko had forced on her.

"Super!"

* * *

...

* * *

"... I have to get out of here," Yomiko muttered, her breaths coming fast and quick and shallow. She wiped her paler-than-normal brow. "Really."

The museum was abuzz with voices, the hushed susurrations of hundreds of people in too-large hallways, staring at the titans that stood around this enclosed space, queuing for the lifts and stairs that led up to the gantries which allowed a new perspective to be obtained of the scale models of the combatants of the Angel War, staring up at the shards of red crystal near each model, and, of course, the raucous noise of small children too small and too sugar-filled to realise that perhaps climbing on Sachiel's foot was not allowed.

The security guards were having some problems removing them.

"What's the matter?" Abi whispered, looking around. "You... um, you know they're not real, right?" she said, referring to the to-scale Angels. "And it's not like you to get freaked out by this kind of thing. I mean, you do look in the mirror, and, well, that time..."

She was silenced by a nudge in the ribs from Michelle.

"Ha ha." Those were words, spoken, not laughter. "Seriously. I'm..." the blue-grey haired girl paused, and pursued her lips, "... I'm feeling a bit sick," she lied, staring up at the titanic white-armoured, single-eyed scale model of Tamiel. In the chill of the museum, a vast facility which dug down into the ground, using old components of the Eva-launch facilities, and rose almost sky-scraper high in fluted white marble, it... "It's like a mausoleum," she said, finally putting words to her feelings. Some of her feelings.

"You _do_ know it's just a model," Michelle said, slightly acerbically.

"I know," she began, wiping again at her cold, clammy face, but... how could she explain this, really? There were things that she didn't tell her friends, even her best friend and her bestest best friend, and what she was feeling right now was certainly one of them. "I just... oh, this was such a mistake."

_You are... all... of you, gar-gar-gar...bage..._

_... sky... itself I shshshshshall tu-turn again...st them_

_... do not be...lieve you are to be sa..._

_... w-works of civi...lization are the ma-mad... ramb...lings of the..._

_I h-h-h-have come..._

There were core fragments. _Actual_ core fragments on display. And they weren't quite as bad as... as the _thing_ in the sealed section of the basement at home – the one that Mama and Daddy didn't think she knew about – sealed under heavy containment but still _alive_, still _aware_, but the echoes...

... couldn't they _hear_? Dead gods whispering ceaselessly the last fragments of their now-lost identity, over and over again, perhaps in a vain hope that their progenitor would find them one day and salvage them. Dead yet eternally dying yet unable to die... and that didn't even make _sense_. Swaying slightly, she leant heavily on Michelle, and was guided by the considerably shorter girl onto leaning on Abi, who could actually take her weight.

And here was one of the museum tour guides, heading over with a concerned look on his face. "I'm fine," Yomiko managed weakly. "I just need some fresh air." Unfortunately, she'd slipped into Arabic when she said that, and the tour guide looked confused, before trying to talk to the obviously foreign people in English.

_...w-w-w-wake, I leave a Dea-Dead Ssssssea._

_The t-tears I shall-all-all shed..._

_Eve-even sta...ing al-one-one-one-one, I am..._

_... help us..._

She missed what he said entirely, as the echoes hit her once again.

"The Angels... they are large, scary. And we just went to the Memorials," Abigael replied, as Yomi tuned back to normalcy, in heavily accented, but passable English. "She's... she's still nervous... I think that is the word... nervous from that. Faint, pale, yes?"

Yes, that had been... disconcerting. Two obelisks, standing side by side. One listing all the people who had been confirmed to have died in the Angel War, carved into white marble. The majority of them had been living in South America, but there were more than enough residents of Tokyo-3 there for there to be regular flowers left around the memorial. The other was for those who had died in Second Impact, and the Impact Wars, and that was merely black, blank basalt, unmarred and unmarked. The people who had died then, almost forty years ago, couldn't ever be properly counted.

But what about all the people in here, a voice in her head protested, before she clamped down on it. These were the remnants of the Angels and Cherubim and the other disparate ADAMite breeds. She was _not_ going to start empathising with them, even... even if they were sort of her uncles and aunts. They were enemies. Monsters. Nothing like her. And... Yomi shuddered, and wiped her brow. "They're just so... big," she said, this time in English, as she felt it was expected of her.

Certainly, it seemed to sate the tour guide. "A lot of people get like that," he said, not unkindly. "How are you feeling? Do you feel sick?"

She shook her head, feeling her bangs, and her unusually-loose hair flick around her. "No," she lied. "Just a bit faint."

"Ah. It would probably be best to get away from this hall." The man smiled. "It's rather cold, and the demonstrations sometimes strike people the wrong way. Come on, let me help you to the East Wing. It's less cold and less... big in there."

"Why, thank you," Abi said, beaming, as she propped Yomi up, clutching onto her hand tightly.

* * *

...

* * *

Michelle Ana Kanonier was not a stupid girl. She was keeping her eyes on Yomiko, even as she got seated down somewhere warm and well lit, and scurried off to grab something sugary from a nearby vending machine, almost forcing the chocolate bar into her friend's mouth. And so once Yomi's red eyes weren't looking so disturbingly distracted, and what little colour there was normally had returned to her face, she poked her in the chest. "What was that about?" the blonde asked, her face a mask of inquisition.

"I'm just feeling a bit queasy," Yomi said. "Must be... jet lag or something. Or the milkshake didn't agree with me."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I'm not lying!"

"Yomi, I've seen you eat a whole pigeon. Raw. And that was pretty much in the middle of Berlin, so those things are all diseasy and fume-poisoned and stuff. You _don't_ get sick." She tilted her head slightly. "Well, unless you drink beer, and that hits about ten seconds after you swallow and then it comes out in a projectile and the stomach acid burns the wall and... I don't even want to think about that." She poked Yomiko in the chest again. "The point is, you haven't had any beer, and you don't get sick. What. Is. Going. On?"

"Maybe she's just tired," Abi suggested. "I mean, it is like... probably about 2am, Germany time."

"Uh nuh," Michelle said, with a glare. "She's not getting out of it this easy. Need I remind you, Abi, we are at the moment in _Japan_, with Yomi as our only way home. What happens if she collapses? What happens if she faints or... or goes into a coma or something? Even _I'd_ be in severe trouble from my mother if I suddenly turned up in Tokyo-3, and that means the two of you would actually be dead. As in... Yomi, you should hope that whatever did it was fatal, because I'm pretty sure your mother would actually have your skin."

"I can regrow it," Yomi managed, weakly.

"Not. The. Point. And it would hurt, at least."

"Agonisingly. Which might be why she'd do it, if... yeah. Don't want that." Yomiko blinked. "But, no." Her eyes flickered from left to right, checking for listeners. "It's not something general. Just about that room."

"What about that room?"

"It's a bit hard to put into words..."

"What about that room?"

"It's complicated, but..."

"Yomi. What. About. That room?"

The pale girl sighed, and rubbed her forehead again, no longer sweating in the same way, but still leaving a damp patch on her white, blue and red T-shirt. "It's something to do with the core fragments in the place," she said, reluctantly. "They're real."

"So?" Miichelle was not willing to let her go.

There was a sigh of irritation. "So. I'm sensitive, they're like corpses. There's... very, very faint mental static of a sort. I can't hear them anymore."

"You can't hear them?" The girl's blue-grey eyes, almost exactly the same colour as her friend's hair, snapped wide. "Yomi, those are _Angels_. Were they telling you to end the world or kill everything? If they were, don't end the world or kill everything. Really. Don't end the world, you understand me?"

"I'm not going to end the world," Yomiko hissed back, with more like her normal force. "It... it wasn't like talking," she said, more softly. "It was... it was like a tombstone."

"Yomiko Nagisa, that was an unsuitable tone of voice, with undertones of melancholy and regret," Michelle snapped. "Do not empathise with the omnicidal monsters!"

"And do you think of me in the same way?" Yomiko said, in a whisper. "What am I meant to do? Think about how the hand of Unit 01 could crush me or Daddy utterly, if it squeezed? How I'm only here because I'm the unplanned product of two lab experiments falling in love?"

Abigael sighed. "'Course not, Yomi," she said. "She's being all hormonal and depressive again. Whatever the place was doing must have done a number on her head. Miche, grab her other arm. We're gonna drag her off to somewhere that does food and stuff her so full of sugar and fizzy drinks that her brain doesn't have room for sadness. Unless..."

Michelle tilted her head. That seemed like... not the best course of action. "You sure? Shouldn't we just get her to take us back to Germany?"

"Yomi, is it that time of the month?" Abi asked, ignoring her other friend.

There was a silent nod, as the three of them sat under the warm electric lights, away from the cold hall.

There was a disgusted sigh. "Yep, thought so." There was a pause as Abi checked her cash reserves. "Okay, Yomi, you owe me like hell for this. I'd saved enough that I should have been able to buy some proper awesome Japanese swords or shuriken or something. 'Stead, we're going to have to force a head-sized lump of chocolate into your mouth or something. It'll be easier on you if you willingly unhinge your jaw, but it's happening one way or another."

"There's no need to do this," Yomi said, weakly. "I'll be fine, and if you want, I'll just take you back."

"Nuh uh," Abigael said, jaw gritted. "Reason one, I haven't got to go to See-Squared yet. Reason two, you've _clearly_ been planning this for ages, and you mustn't run away as soon as anything difficult comes up. 'Cause then you'll just get all mopey for _ages_, and feel that you wasted your only chance to see this place, and then we'll have to put up with you whining." She coughed, making the pink hairband with the A10 clips on it slide forwards slightly. "And no-one wants that."

"And if Angels were actually telling her to end the world?" Michelle asked drily.

The blonde flicked her head. "She's our _friend_, Miche. I think we can trust her in that regard, you know."

* * *

...

* * *

Dr Asuka Ikari-Soryu, Head Scientist of the Evangelion Project, and former pilot, sighed, and slipped off her VR visualisation goggles. Slowly, her hand went up to pinch the bridge of her nose, to relieve the oncoming stress headache.

From the way that the flesh there was somewhat reddened, she had been doing that repeatedly.

It just wasn't making sense. There had been a massive anomalous signal, a Pattern Blue of such a level that it had burned out sensors all across the city. But then it had just gone. It wasn't a sensor ghost, because it had physically damaged machinery. It wasn't ADAM, thank God. But at the moment, she didn't know what it was.

It would almost certainly have been easier to isolate what she could of the signal to determine its unique characteristics if she wasn't _also_ having to account for all the other Pattern Blues and Pattern Blue/Oranges in the city. Uri, Mari, Junior, Lilly, the infestations of various –im species... and that was just the ones which had been around at the time of the Angel War. There were so many more now. Asuka restrained herself from checking if Dr Ibuki had yet managed to coax the MAGI into decohering the signal properly, from the limited sample they had; Maya would tell her when it was done, and she would just slow things down if she kept on checking.

But mentally she still cursed the seaside aquarium for keeping gaghielim. That just wasn't _helpful_.

"Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!"

The duckling cries of a little girl sounded behind her, as a pair of arms reached up to hug around her neck. And despite the fact that she was hugging a little too tight, Asuka smiled, and carefully unhooked the arms, spinning around on her chair to take her daughter onto her lap.

"Hello, Ari," she said, giving her a welcoming hug. "Come to see your mama working, have you?"

"Yep!"

Her daughter looked so much like she had looked at the same age; perhaps a little rounder in the face, with a rather Ikari-like jawline, her hair more auburn than reddish blonde. But, still, Ariel took after her mother rather than her father.

And the few freak blue hairs the little girl occasionally got, and the way that she seemed to have a little more energy than should be possible for even an excitable nine year old... well, that was a minor thing. Far, far less than it could have been, considering the terrible linked events, almost 20 years ago, of New Vegas and Zeruel's incursion. The slight Nephilimisation passed down wasn't enough for a core or an S2 Organ, and at worst, as Zyuu had said at her birth, she'd have a tendency towards twins.

The excitability was probably a consequence of her primary babysitter being her Aunty Rei, anyway.

"M-much as I do love you being here, Ari, I thought you were meant to be pl-playing in the play place. You know, with Gunnhildr and Seika and all the others."

A giggle. "I wanted to see you, so I got out through the vents. Plus they were startin' to play with AT-Field stuff, and that's boring and I can't do it."

Asuka sighed. "Ari. I'm sorry, but I'm... I'm trying to work."

The little girl pouted. "But Mama! It's a _Saturday_, and we're meant to be doing stuff together! People don't work on Saturday, silly!" Her lips twisted. "At least, they're not _meant_ to."

"I know that, Ari. But..." the woman sighed, "... I have to. It's an emergency."

"But we were meant to be going _shopping_ together! And then doing something with Daddy!"

There was a knock at her door, and First Lieutenant Harasami poked her head in. "Dr Ikari-Soryu?" she asked, hesitantly. "You wanted to see me?"

"I did?" Asuka blinked. Yes, there had been something, but... what was it? It couldn't have been that important, she thought, with a glance at her screen and her virtual board of post-it notes. An idea struck her. "Yes! I did." She adjusted her glasses. "Kirishma, I wanted you to look after Ari for the morning. She's g-getting antsy, so, please, can you take her out to lu-lunch and to the shops?"

There was a loud "Yaa~aaaay!" from the child, who slithered off her mother's lap, and hopped and skipped over to the rather surprised looking woman. "Come on, Kiri, let's go!"

"But, Doctor... I was meant to..." Her shoulders slumped, and she smiled as she looked down at the little girl, who beamed back up. "Yes. Come on, Ari. What do you want to eat?"

"Hmm." Ari's tongue jutted out, as she thought. "Oooh! Can we go to _Koizuhi's_? They do that really nice 'bit-stew thing!"

"Ari. You had that last weekend. Why not..."

"I'm a little carnivore, Aunty Rei says! Graaagh!" mimed the little girl, baring her teeth and making claws with her fingers.

Both women let out a slight sigh at the sheer adorableness of the sight, even if one of them did shudder from long-repressed trauma.

"We'll see," Lieutenant Harasami said. "Okay, Doctor, I'll keep her entertained for a few hours, if you'll tell Hikari why I'm away. That's... sort of important. Tell her and Zenith, actually. Be very, very sure to tell them."

"Yes, I will tell Hikari," Asuka said. "And, Kiri? Stay close to any evacuation routes. If you get buzzed with an alarm, you should _get Ariel out of there_, understand. Make sure you can _run_ if the Patt..." she glanced down at her daughter, "... if the reason I'm in today shows up again. If you need to, _run_."

The uniformed woman swallowed, and nodded, taking the little girl's hand and squeezing it.

* * *

...

* * *

"Yomi, unhinge your jaw properly! This will be much easier for all of us!"

"Pfft... mmmft...you're getting it up my nose!"

"Well, if you opened your mouth properly, this wouldn't be happening!"

"Such excitement."

"You could help too, Michelle!"

The tiny blonde looked up from her plate of cake, which was stacked rather high. "I'd really rather not," she said, eyes flicking over to the purple-and-green-painted counter. "I mean, we've only paid for this all-you-can-eat for 15 minutes, and they charge you more if you can't eat it all."

"Well, you shouldn't have taken so mu...mmmft!" began Yomi, before Abi took the chance provided by her open mouth to force more cake in. She convulsively swallowed. "... this is good. Who'd have thought the Museum of Awesome would do such good cake? You don't need to force-feed me, Abi, I... mmmft!"

"I'm not willing to take the risk!" Abi yelled, and then winced, as other people stared at her. "You need sugar, until you can't think properly!"

"Even I can't eat that fa... glglglglg."

"Have some drink to wash it down, and then keep eating!"

Michelle dabbed at her mouth, and sighed. "I am sorry, they are getting carried away with their costumes," she hoped she announced to the room at large, before she descended upon a strawberry tart.

She distinctly heard a "But they're doing it wrong! Rei should be force-feeding Asuka!" from behind her, but ignored it. Likewise, she ignored the "And look, the Rei-girl got the hair colour completely wrong, and... yeah, she's not good," and the "The Asuka-girl's pretty damn good though. Even if she's acting more like Rei, at least she looks the part," and the "Who's the other one? Annette, maybe? Nah."

Being friends with Yomiko, you learned when to ignore things.

* * *

...

* * *

Three teenage girls sat on the curb, watching the electric cars go past. Above, in these steel-and-glass canyons, the isfrabirds chattered. One of them was really rather sticky and cake-covered, with her T-shirt covered in crumbs, and large amounts of orange staining it.

"Feeling better?" Abi asked.

"What was _in_ that juice stuff?" Yomiko asked, her pupils somewhat dilated. "It was good. Really, really good. Why don't they sell it in Germany! Whh~hhhy!"

There was a crack, and a release of gas as Michelle opened another can, and took a sip. And immediately spat it out. "Eugh! That's... that can't be orange, surely. That's just _sweetness_. Like... platonic sweetness."

"And if you don't want it, I'll have it, Miche," the red-eyed girl said, eyed locked on the can. "_Ree~eally_. So good!"

Abigael grinned. "Didn't even know it was orange flavoured. But it had a picture of one of your mum's sisters on the front, and I think that these characters mean 'favourite drink of...' or something. Plus, we gotta experience the Japanese way of life." She took a drink from her own can. "And, you know, once you get past the sweetness, it's sort of nice. Well, not nice, but you want to keep drinking it."

"Ah, you like the feeling of your teeth rotting, do you?" Michelle said, handing over her can to Yomi. "I happen not to like it."

"Mine regrow." Yomiko leapt to her feet. "Come on!" she declared to the world. "Let's do _stuff_!"

"Should we have given her an energy drink?"

"'Least she's not being all mopey. You know how bad she gets when it's that time of the month." The reddish blonde girl grinned. "Now, come on, Yomi! Let's go to See-Squared."

"To See-Squared! For _WISDOM_ and the _HUMANITIES_!"

"No. Probably shouldn't have."

"It'll be fine."

* * *

...


	4. 3: It Gets Worse

...

See-Squared, as it so happened, was a sprawling megacomplex of shops and stalls, which looked to have been built around some of the old retracting buildings in Tokyo-3. Built around was the operative word, because there were gantries and aerial roads connecting building to building, so there was no way that the buildings could lower any more. The gantries and skyways were lined with even more stores and carts, so, in the midst of all this technological splendour, there was suddenly a strange archaism to the packed streets – at least until you looked out over the rest of the city to either side, or up above you.

"Woo~ooo~oow," drawled Yomiko. "It's _ree~eeally_large!"

"... and I'm saying that maybe we did give her too much!" Michelle said, continuing the argument.

"Look, would you rather see her depressed and mopey?"

"That's not relevant to whether you gave her too much sugar! Remember my 9th birthday party?"

Abi grinned, white teeth showing. "Oh, that was cool."

"She ran straight through a _tree_. And then it caught fire."

"Well... that was sort of your mum's fault for not checking that all the drinks were decaffeinated."

"Well, I..." Michelle paused, and groaned, clutching her abdomen. "Oww. Stomach ache. I think I ate too much. Well, first there was the milkshake, and then..."

"And then you pigged out on cake," Abi said, with a grin. "You're not tall like me or Yomi. You don't have places to store it."

"I pigged out? You're the one who filled your bag with cake when they weren't looking, just so you could eat them later... and they had a _sign_up saying that you couldn't do that!"

"Well, duh, that's just..." Abigael paused, and looked around, eyes flickering wide. "Oh God. Where's Yomi?"

* * *

...

* * *

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: The Yomiko Absolution**

**Chapter 3: It Gets Worse**

* * *

...

* * *

"Okay, okay, okay," Abigael said, running her fingers through her red-blonde hair. "Don't freak out. Don't panic. Whatever you do, don't panic!"

Michelle blinked. "I'm not panicking," she said, flatly. "Well, I am. But panicking won't be useful. Where did we leave her?"

"Right next to us! And now she's not there anymore!"

A scan of the crowded sector revealed that, yes, that was very much the case.

"Right." Michelle blinked, and took off the horn-rimmed glasses she had been given as part of her 'costume'. "God, those things are giving me a headache. In that case, think. Imagine you were Yomi. And you've drunk caffeine, so you're being really hyper and just doing things randomly because you want to do them, with no self-control. What would you do?"

Abigael screwed up her face. "Um. Um. Um. Blah blah blah, I love bacon and eating lots and lots of food and reading really boring long books with lots of footnotes..."

"Mmm hmm, mmm hmm. Also, I never have to work at understanding languages and seem to always speak them so I can understand everything that everyone says to me and talk back to them... in fact, generally, I don't really try even half as hard as most people at school, and still get really good marks."

"And my parents are incredibly rich and so I always get stuff bought for me, so I assume that I'll always get what I want eventually, especially if I ask my Dad. So I assume that I'm going to get my way if I just keep on doing what I want. And my parents are nice, a bit weird, but nice."

"... and I'm tall and thin and naturally athletic but I bitch on and on about being flat-chested despite the fact that... God, have you seen her mother? She's obviously got the genes for it. And I'm probably never going to even hit one metre sixty," Michelle added, with growing bitterness. "She... I mean _I_don't have to put up with having to buy children's skirts because they don't make ones that fit her properly."

"Also, I don't have to obey gravity when I don't feel like it, I can fly, crawl on ceilings, fit through vents, teleport, and," Abi shuddered, "I'm not really human. Not pure human, at least. I mean, I'm half-Ree, and my dad is Kaworu Nagisa. Oh, and I have a phobia of French maids and get enraged by the little contact I have with the rest of my family." She looked thoughtful for a moment, and adjusted her A10-replica hairband. "So, what would she do with all that, Miche?"

"Oh, and I'll drag people off to Japan and then leave them here alone with no way of getting home! And I'll randomly kidnap Michelle when she's asleep and drag her up a tree or into the woods because I've decided that we're going to go camping and she never bothered to even ask me! Why are we friends with her, again!" the blonde blurted out. "God! She always does things like that! Why!"

Abi raised one eyebrow, at her friend, who was panting, shoulders shaking. "Feelin' better?" she asked.

A pause.

"... yes. Venting. Good."

"And we're friends because you met her on the first day of school and decided that you were best friends because her hair was the same colour as your eyes, and I met her in the playground because she said I felt a teeny-tiny bit like her dad and so she could trust me and then we pushed some boys who were being mean into the sandpit," Abigael reminded her.

"That was a rhetorical question, Abi."

"Oh. 'Kay. But still. Right, that's how Yomi thinks, right? So where's she going to be?"

Michelle shrugged, ignoring the stares and wolf-whistles from somewhere behind her. "Why would I know? But... okay. At a guess, she's eaten recently, so she won't be near food."

"Mmm hmm." Abi nodded. "Bookstores, then?"

"We'll try them. And just wonder around for a few hours, because if she comes to her senses, she'll try to find us, probably by sending a message for us over the PA system, so we should stay in See-Squared." The blonde paused. "And also, I think those boys want your attention."

Abigael turned, and bowed deeply, eyes twinkling with mischief, at the gaggle of boys who were lurking around by the entrance. "_Kónnichi wa_! _Es ist nett_to meet you, boys-kun!"

Michelle sighed. "Do you have to do that?"

"Yep!"

"You know they're asking if you want to be their Asuka? I don't know what Yomi was thinking when she gave you that costume." She tilted her head. "Well, apart from 'you both have reddish hair'. So that's probably what she was thinking."

"Hmm... are any of them cute?"

"Abi! We're looking for Yomi!"

"And a cute boy is the perfect person to help us look!"

"They'll just get abusive or get obnoxious because you're flirting, and then you'll have to stun baton them and I'll have to kick them." She looked down, at the rather heavy black boots she was wearing. "And I knew that'd happen, so I wore these ones."

"Aww! But that bit's the _fun_bit!"

"I know. First, Yomi."

* * *

...

* * *

The lift hummed to a stop, a chime announcing that it had reached its destination, and its sole human occupant stepped out, accompanied by a palm-sized drone, which floated around her at eye level. The echoes of her footsteps were the only noise in this section of the Geofront, deep within the Black Egg, though far above Sheol.

Nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel Hikari Horaki still made regular visits down here, even if she was waddling slightly. That was the reason she was even doing this, rather than waiting in the ready stations along with the other current pilots. It was stressful to not be in the action, to not be piloting her Unit 04a, along with Zenith, but the rules against pregnant pilots were a part of Project Evangelion which dated almost back to the very beginning.

She just wished this anomalous Pattern Blue hadn't come when she was off duty, and knew in the back of her head that she was getting too old for this. She really should think about retiring from active duty, and taking up that post of Director of Operations which Commander Katsuragi was constantly offering her.

The face in the window on the drone, a quicksilver facsimile of her own visage at age 16, stared back impassively. "_You are running behind schedule,_" it chided her.

"Yes, I know, Zenith," she told the Synthesis AI.

"_Why did you not talk to her over a link?_"

"Because it's good to see her, and..." Hikari sighed. "... and I can't do anything useful until Asuka or Maya or Kimuna actually obtain data on what the Pattern Blue was. I might as well see her."

"_Hmm_." It was a deliberate noise.

"You're a born Sergeant Major, Zenith."

"_I know._" The AI coughed. "_And you're here._"

Hikari tilted her head. "Ah, she's waiting," she said, checking the panel by the door.

* * *

...

* * *

The woman behind the counter, whose hair was dyed a particularly radioactive green glanced down at the mixture of books and manga which Michelle had dumped down on the counter. "'Captain Gacchiri'? 'Yowie!'? 'Pleasure Boy Uriel and the Machiavellian Manipulations of Mana and Mari and Other Stories'?" She scanned through the pile, eyebrows rising at each new title. "Oh, '03 Plug Penetration', that one is a classic. But uh, yes, I'm going to have to see some proof of age from you."

"German passport?" Michelle said, in her best poor-quality Japanese, offering the document.

Now came the hard bit, the bit where she wished she wasn't quite so short. She only hoped that that woman wasn't completely fluent in German or English, and wasn't used to what a German passport looked like. If she could recognise them on sight, then she'd know...

... no, phew. The green-haired woman only checked the date of birth, rather than scan the biometrics. Maybe the Japanese were more used to people being short, and so didn't get so suspicious of the fact that this passport claimed that she was 17.

Who really cared about proof of age, anyway? It wasn't like she hadn't read these all online anyway. She just was trying to support the print industry, because she'd enjoyed them rather a lot. Well, and paper copies were more useful for... certain purposes. She'd have to keep them under the floorboards, though, where The Brat couldn't find them. And hide them from Yomi, who got stupidly outraged about something as simple as hentai yaoi doujins which featured her dad and his identical twin brother.

It wasn't like Michelle was buying them for that, anyway. As far as she was concerned, that was just a coincidence that it was Yomi's father in them. No, it was the fact that Yomi's father apparently had just looked like her older brother did now which was like the real reason why she liked them. Not many girls could get this kind of thing for the boy they had a crush on, and she intended to make the best that she could of this chance.

Internally, she let out a small squee, at the delicious Logoscest waiting for her within the pages.

"Yes, that's valid proof of ID," the woman said, and Michelle smirked, as she counted out the money. There were _some_advantages to having a paranoid lecturer in complexity theory, who was involved in the Data Angels and other anti-corporatist infofree digianarchist groups, for a mother.

If only she'd spend less time being worried about 'The Ophelia Initiative' and 'SEELE' and other fictional groups, and would actually pay more attention to meatspace. And would actually do things, rather than smiling ineffectually, and leaving Michelle to make the dinner every night for herself and her brat of a half-brother.

"No sign of Yomi in there," she told Abiagel who was waiting outside, propped up on the railing despite the explicit 'Do not climb' warning. "I asked. And checked if any of the vents were loose, because they were selling both books and stuff that..." she coughed, "... you know what she did to the boys who bought in the naked calendar. And you know how she holds grudges."

"Ah." Abi shook her head, nevertheless grinning, and leant backwards over the drop. "That was _hilarious_."

The corner of the blonde's mouth crept up. "It was pretty funny, yes. Especially the bit with the duct-tape."

"Do you ever wonder if we're the bad girls?"

Michelle blinked. "What was that? Where did that come from?"

Abigael sniggered. "Good." Unhooking one foot, she flipped forwards off the wall, landing in a crouch. "Come on, I wanna go check the knife shops," she added, straightening up. "I want a proper Japanese katana... oh, I might have to keep it at your house until I can justify how I got it to my mum, because she wants to do all my weapons buying, but this is something I can't miss the chance. Oh, and can I sort of..."

"... yes, Abi, you can borrow some money."

"Awesome."

* * *

...

* * *

Opening the door, Lieutenant Colonel Horaki stepped through into another corridor. But this corridor was not to scale. Although it appeared similar to the one which she had just left, it was fifteen metres high, and she was merely standing on a gantry that ran about half-way up.

And waiting for her was a vast octahedron. Well, actually, by the standards of an Evangelion pilot who had served in the Angel War, it wasn't that large; perhaps ten metres tall and wide. But by human scales, it was a titanic mass of pink, slightly luminescent crystal. Floating around it were smaller ones; the largest about the height of an adult man, the smallest half that, but the pink octahedron dominated the space.

And, as one, the things that floated _within_the crystals, humanoid shapes turned and directed their glowing red gazes on the intruder. Babies, from newborns to toddlers, were within the lesser shapes, legs and arms moving, yet never leaving the confines of the geometry. And with the hulking mass, a figure which looked like a teenage girl in a swimming costume let go of her computer which froze like an insect in amber. She kicked off, from where she held herself static at the centre, and approached the wall by the door, eyes like two dying suns directed towards the NERV officer.

Hikari shrugged, and essayed a small wave to the figure, which was now floating within the crystal, right up against its edge. "Mari," she said, warmth in her voice.

"**Ah. Hikari. Heya, so you got my message,**" Mari said, in a voice which sounded like fingers over wine glasses, and which came from the crystalline bulk rather than from the humanoid body within. "**Kids, say hello to Mrs Suzuhara.**"

There was a chorus of "**Hello**" and "**Hi**from the crystal-geometry-enmeshed babies, some of the Marielim floating closer to stare at her with burning red gazes. Hikari noted Mari wasn't doing much better at persuading them to wear clothes on their humanoid parts, within the crystal.

"I'm here on work business, Mari. It's Hokari still, here."

"**Oh, of course."** Mari twisted slightly, floating through the crystal bulk that was her body just as much as the vestigial Lilim part, as she tried to smooth down her hair. "**But, kids. Can you please let me and Hikari talk for a bit?**"

"**But, Mum...**" began one of the larger ones, the child within looking toddler sized.

"**No buts. Please, Sein, Mummy needs to talk to Hikari about NERV business.**"

With only a modicum of complaints, the Marielim bobbed off. Mari span, looking around to see that they had actually obeyed her, before nodding once.

"How have you been?" Hikari asked, to delay while the Marielim got further away. It was one of the things she tried to do at NERV; give Mari human contact. The girl... the woman, despite the fact that her human body hadn't aged since her "death", had begun to calcify since that desperate battle against Galgaliel, when she had drawn on far more power than she should have, to try to save Hikari from the Cherubim, which had her pinned down, and had been getting down her plug. Mari had chosen to go all out, and not a moment too soon. Hikari could still remember that terrifying moment as the creature crushed the top of her entry plug.

There had been fears that Mari would destroy Cainarchonite Prototype Unit 00 and herself when she did it, overloading it. She had not. But instead, she had begun to... metamorphose. And attempts to remove the crystal, to give her freedom of movement as a human being, had been called off from the agony that they inflicted on her. She was still putting on bulk, still swelling; in less than a decade, they would have to move her again, as she outgrew these hallways.

Hikari owed her, she knew this, even if the other woman insisted she'd do it again if she had the chance.

Mari sighed, a thrumming noise which resounded through the chamber. "**Bored**," she admitted. "**Nothing good's come out for a while, and... argh. Thank God for the kids, basically; I'd go crazy without them.**" The noted of frustration was dissonant, sharp. "**But that's not why I wanted to talk. Listen to me, I sound like I'm briefing you. God, if this is a real Angel, I can actually do something to help. Deploy and get to the surface and fight it. Anything.**"

"Mari." There was a sharper note in Hikari's voice, which she regretted.

**Yes. I need to talk to you. I can feel... something. Up above. And in my mind, the feelings are screaming that it's something that **_**should not be**_**.**"

* * *

...

* * *

There was some_thing_hanging upside down, high up in See-Squared. Two red lights glinted in the darkness, where the buildings and the gantries and the walkways meshed and intertwined, where no sun ever shone. With the clicking of claws, it detached itself from its watching point, and scuttled through the shadows, too fast for the eyes to track. It froze for a moment, as some unnatural sense alerted it to the CCTV camera, and darted through a gap in its field of view. The click of its limbs unheard over the noise of the built up area, it made its way down.

Closer towards its prey.

Soundlessly, it passed through the door to the old, dusty bookstore, not even making the bell ring. There was an old man behind the desk, and the thing showed its teeth. But first it had to scout the area, look around. And that was harder than the beast would have liked.

Oh well. It

Jiro Suzuki, owner of Suzuki's Books, jolted out of his stupor, every nerve screaming that there was something hunting him, and fumbled for his glasses.

"These book! These books! These _boo~oooks!_" Yomiko span around, eyes whirling. "They're _not in alphabetical order!_ How are you meant to find _anything_in here! I'm looking for a book!"

The elderly proprietor froze. "Which one?" he asked, hesitantly. "I do try to keep a catalogue, and..."

"Catalogue! What's your overall filing schee~eeeme! I _need_ to see it! _It must be improved,_ because... eurghckt! How can you _stand_it when not everything is in a proper precise order? And I'll need to read everythin', to find what I'm looking for! And I need a list of ISBN numbers and woo~ooow am I talking fast and endin' all my sentences in questions or exclamations! No time to consider it, I need a good book! I'm bo~ooored and I need something new to read!"

The old man, who really didn't deserve what was about to happen to his collection, could only blink as Yomiko descended into the stacks again.

* * *

...

* * *

"_Nah naaah_ returns to nothing _nah naah nah nah-nah-nah_tumbling down, tumbling down," sang Ariel Ikari-Soryu, in a valiant effort only a little bit thwarted by the fact that she couldn't remember most of the words to the theme. Nevertheless, she was not about to let such ignorance thwart her, and so she continued to make her way through the song. Grinning at herself in the mirror, she spun around, letting the dress flare around her, before she tilted her head, and stared at herself. Scooping her hair back into a crude ponytail, she looked at herself with critical eyes.

The 'Ear-ring Problem' was a long-standing issue for her. She kind of wanted them, because some of the other girls at school had them, and they looked really pretty, but then again Mama said she was too young and it would hurt because – and Ari shuddered – they had to stab you in the ear to get them in and that was scary. And most of her Aunties didn't have them, and they were really pretty ladies, and she'd talked to Aunty Kiko about them and Aunty Kiko had said that she liked them a _lot_, but that she herself couldn't wear them because her ears healed up too fast, but Aunty Siyon had said they were just hurting yourself and weren't that nice and also that if she was going to that, she should only ever get studs, because if she got hoops, someone could _tear_them out of your ear.

Which was _really_scary.

Pouting slightly, she let her hair fall back forwards, and returned her attention to the dress. It was yellow, and nice and summery and _surely_Mama would like it because it was always hot in Tokyo-3. Not like when she visited Aunty Una and it was all cold and stormy in Australia.

"Ari?" called her current carer, over the door to the changing rooms. "Uh... are you going to be much longer?"

Ari liked Kiri. She was nice, and worked with Mama, which was why she sometimes looked after her, when Mama was busy. "Nope!" she called back, reaching up to undo the buttons. "Just changing. It fits and everything, so I'm going to get it."

"Are you sure, Ari?" said a German-accented voice from her backpack.

The girl beamed at her. "What do you think, Dollie?" she asked her oldest friend who wasn't Zwei. Mama had made one of her childhood dolls better just for her, and had said that Dollie would always be there to protect her and look after her. That was true, and in return, Ari had taught Dollie all _kinds_of new things, like songs and how to skip and how not to say 'Affirmative' when you meant 'Yes'. "Is it pretty, or is it really pretty?"

"I think you're not thinking this through properly," the rag-doll said, poking its head out of her bag. "You have another dress almost the same as this one, and think about it. This will use almost all the spending money that Mama has given you this week, won't it?"

Ari pouted. "But I was gonna get her to say that it counted as important clothing spending, because the weather's getting hotter," she protested.

"Are you sure that you want to risk that you won't have any money left?"

There was a sigh. "But... awwww. It's really _comfy_and cute! And... and...and it's got pockets and I like pockets, because they're where I keep my stuff, and not enough of my stuff always has pockets in." The little girl hunched her shoulders. "Aunty Iti says that you can never have enough pockets," she informed Dollie.

"Yes, you told me this." The doll shrugged, a strange, almost sinuous motion that came from the fact that it didn't have bones. "I am just saying that you should be aware of the cost, and... well. Would it not be better to get Mama to buy this, so you can try it on together and she can tell you that it's not too tight?"

Childish fingers drummed against the glass. "I guess you're right. I mean, I know it's not too tight, but Mama always wants to be there when I buy clothes." She shot a glance back at the doll. "She doesn't even trust Daddy," she said, solemnly. "She says that he doesn't get colours properly, 'cause he doesn't get way that colours have to match when you have red hair, because he has brown hair and so everything goes with that." She cocked her head. "Well, apart from those blue hairs that Mama plucks out from him and me. But he has mostly brown hair and me and Mama have red hair, but they're not the same red."

"She's right there." The doll tugged its own woollen locks. "Nobody gets it properly, do they? Except for me and you and Mama, right?"

"Mnmmgner," was the best representation of the noise Ari made.

"Now you should probably change back into your clothes, and go get some food. You know how grumpy you get when you don't have your snacks."

A smile on her face, Ari let out a happy noise. "Mmm, snacks."

* * *

...

* * *

The bustle of the crowd was near-constant, but the two German girls could still make their way through, if only because Abigael, despite the fact that she was still only twelve, was the same height as many of the men, and so could be used as a battering ram by her friend. At least until she froze, standing on tip-toes to look over the crowd.

"What are you doing, Abi?" asked Michelle, a note of irritation in her voice. "Don't just stop like that."

"Stop like what?"

"Like that!"

"But I'm looking at something!"

The petite girl narrowed her eyes. "I can't see _anything_in this crowd. Argh! Even the Japanese are too tall!"

"You get to buy ultra-cheap children's clothes still, right? I haven't been able to do that since I was ten," and her voice dropped, "... and doesn't my mum let me know that."

A pause. Then, "So I guess that means that you weren't checking if you saw Yomi, right?" Michelle asked, laconically.

There was a giggle from the girl dressed as Asuka. "Oh, it's worse than that. See, I've been seeing lots of people with blue hair, 'cause..."

"... because there are lots of people dressed like... like one of Yomi's aunts. I know."

"Yeah. Worse. See, I can sorta tell the difference between real blue, and dyed blue, 'cause that's what Yomi's disguise is, she doesn't have proper blue; it's more grey now, almost." Abigael's voice dropped. "There are people who are actually actually blue-haired. Well, they're a mix. Like... you know how Yomi's hair is all that colour. Actually blue-grey? Well, these people have mixed hair." Abigael paused, searching for words. "You know, like how my dad's hair is actually a mix of white and black, so it looks grey. Well, these people are a mix of blue and brown, or blue and black, so they look darker real shades."

Michelle spluttered and choked. "How many?" she managed.

"Seen... oh, one, two so far. Red eyes, too. And...um, some of them looked sort of Yomi-ish. You know, about the cheekbones. And like her mother."

"So... cousins," Michelle said, softly. "Probably. Think they'll be like her?"

"Probably." Abigael's eyes narrowed, in an uncharacteristic display of seriousness. "Mama says that it's inherited. There's some things she's explained to be 'bout them, 'cause I'm friends with Yomi, and she doesn't want me getting hurt." She perked up. "Oh, and there's a traditional Japanese dress shop over there. And next to it. Ohmigod! It's the See-Squared traditional district! Come on, Miche! Let's get kiminos or something! And I can look at the blades, and maybe get a shuriken set, or some sais, if they're good quality ones."

"We're looking for _Yomi_!"

"She'll find us. An'," Abi shook her head. "Look, we might as well take advantage of this. It's not like we'll be able to find her if she doesn't want to be found, so we might as well get stuff we want, and then wait for her to make explosions or something." She grinned broadly, flashing white teeth cheerfully. "I mean, you've kinda already done that, with all those things you got in that manga shop."

The blonde moved to protest, thought better of it, and sighed. "You're brighter than you look," Michelle muttered.

* * *

...

* * *

Ari emerged from the dressing room, the unwanted garment in hand. "Dollie said I shouldn't get it", she announced to her presumably-waiting supervisor. "So I need to go give it back to the shop-man, even though it's really nice."

"I pointed out that you should probably have your Mama there when you buy it," the voice came from her backpack.

"Dollie said I shouldn't get it," the little girl reasserted, with a flick of her auburn hair. "So we can go get... Aiko!" she squealed, taking in the sixteen-year old girl standing next to Lieutenant Harasami. Ari dropped the dress, and ran over to give her cousin a bullet-like flying hug-tackle. The older girl, dressed in what appeared to be a suit and wearing a top-hat, with a red armband which said "Security", swayed from the impact, but managed to stay standing, and in return ruffled Ariel's hair, which caused her to let go.

"Argh! Aiko! You're messing up my hair!"

The girl smirked, amusement in her reddish-brown eyes. "It was totally an accident, Ari," she said.

"Was not! You did it totally on purpose!" She jumped up, trying to reach the older girl's own head, to return the favour. "That was mean! It's all messy and static-y now!"

Aiko took a swift step back, guarding her waist-length hair, pale blue and mid-brown interweaving, to give what appeared to be, from a distance, a darker shade of blue. "No," she said, warningly. "Kiri, get Ari to keep away from the hair."

"Um... please, both of you? Can you not squabble?"

"But she messed up my hair!" Ari said, pouting.

The woman in the NERV uniform had a nervous expression. "Then... um, you could try being a better person and not retaliating," she suggested.

That was given due consideration. "But I'd rather mess up her hair too!" was the retort.

"Aiko, could you apologise to Ari for messing up her hair? Please? And, Ari, Aiko's at work, so she's got to look nice," the older woman said, squaring her jaw.

"... 'kay."

"Okay, sorry, Ari." Aiko bounced up and down on her toes. "Yep, I'm Baron Von Rei today, being all evil and stuff. Not at all like Aunty Rei, of course. But you know how it is," she added, with a shrug, twiddling a non-existent moustache. "Oh, Bee-Tee-Doubleyou, would any of you want some of my _marmalade_. It make you commit adulter..." she glanced down at her nine-year old cousin, "... that is, it makes you need the toilet."

"Adulter-what?"

"I kinda misspoke." The girl shrugged, and glanced over at two other boys, in the 'Henchmen of Baron Von Rei' costumes, complete with their own Security armbands. "Look, I gotta get back to patrolling. Gotta do the job if I want the money, after all, plus See-See pays me extra 'cause I look the part, so I wanna keep it. Plus, Mom'd totally be disappointed in me if I lost it 'cause I was talking to you, Ari," she teased, poking the little girl in the nose.

"I would never ever do that!" Ari said, pouting. "I would go and tell Aunty Hatchi that it wasn't my fault!"

The girl grinned. "Seeya, Aunty Kiri, and Lil'Cousin Ari," she said, strolling off.

* * *

...

* * *

Several strange things were observed by other proprietors of shops in See-Squared during the afternoon.

A large chain store which sold office stationery found itself denuded of five boxes of sticky labels, a pack of fine-line pens, and a hand-held printer. They also found a cash sum equal to the value of the missing items stuck to a mirror in the staff toilets, along with a receipt printed on the aforementioned hand-printer.

Similar payments and receipts were found in hardware stores, purchasing quick-dry paint, brushes, free-standing lights, and power extension cables.

And a marketplace vendor, who sold ethically sourced bags and suitcases, reported later specifically seeing a teenage girl dropping down from the ceiling in front of her stall. In her words "Poor girl, surprised she didn't break a leg. She'd obviously tried so hard for her Ayanami costume, but she was too skinny, too flat, and her hair just wasn't the right colour. Some people just can't pull the look off, you know."

Thirty-three minutes after she had first entered, Yomiko Nagisa skipped out of the bookstore, trailing her new travel-case behind her. It was sitting heavy on its wheels, packed with her new purchases.

Behind her, the elderly shop owner stared, wide-eyed, at the contents of his store, and the depths of reorganisation, redecoration, and installation of new lights which had occurred. It was well lit, the walls were suddenly a brilliant white, and all the books were neatly categorised into genre and by author. She'd even cleaned the windows.

Slowly, he sank to his knees. He stared at the teen as she left, gaze numb, and saw her leap up, out of sight, in an impossible jump. And he knew the truth.

He'd just been Reiped.

* * *

...

* * *

"These? These are terrible quality blades!" Abigael announced loudly, in German, to the man behind the counter. "That's cutlery-grade steel, at best! Seriously! I wouldn't even use that to cut a sandwich! It would bend if it hit bread!"

No. They did not understand, because she was speaking in German, and Michelle said as much to her.

"I don't care if they were made the traditional ways!" Abi continued, jabbing her finger at the pair of sais lying on the table. "They're junk! _Kuzu! Gomi!_No way!"

Michelle grabbed her, muttering a curse of her own as she tried to cope with the sleeve of her new black and red kimono, worn open over her normal clothes, and tried to drag the other girl.

"Quality traditional weapons? Hah! _Anata ga hanbai shite_... um... _iru baai wa, subete no dorobo!_" the reddish-blonde managed, before she could be manhandled out.

Michelle sighed, as they walked off, cutting into a staircase to try to get back down to the bottom. "Why would you even want to do that?" she asked. "I mean, come on. Why are you best at Japanese when ranting? That's more coherent words than you managed all trip." She sighed. "I'm starting to get worried," she admitted. "We haven't heard anything from Yomi yet, and... and I'm getting a bit scared." She clicked her fingers. "I will kill her if she doesn't get us out of here soon!"

"Heh. The language-anger thing _is_sort of a gift." Abi looked back, and blinked. "Um. Miche? We're sorta being followed by... a girl in a top hat and a monocle, and two boys dressed like... I dunno. I think they might be gay, or maybe strippers, 'cause no-one wears ruff-things like that." Her eyes lit up. "Actually, I'm fine with both."

"Abi," Michelle said wearily, "they're wearing Security armbands. And that's some of the mascot stuff from See-Squared. You know, Baron Von Rei and all that. You know, on the signs everywhere."

Comprehension dawned in the red-blonde's eyes. "Ah! So that's what that meant!"

"... in retrospect, why did I get you to look for Yomi? You're chronically unobservant at times, you know that."

"Because I'm tall, and you can't see over the crowds."

"Well, yeah, but..." Michelle yawned. "Argh! It's getting late. We've been up all night. And it's only... stupid time zones and jet lag. I want to sl..."

"Heeeey~! Stop there!" the girl in the top hat and monocle, long bluish-brown hair cascading down her back, called out, her English heavily accented. "We Security!"

"... I think that's one of Yomi's relatives," Michelle muttered in German, eyes widening momentarily in shocked semi-recognition. "Hair, eyes... yeah, a bit around the face. Just our luck. Not good at all." She stared flatly at the other girl. "Yes," she responded flatly, in English, deliberately reducing her own accent as best she could to spite the other girl.

That did not seem to impress the girl in the top hat, who only looked a few years older than her. "You making trouble," she said, narrowing her eyes. "We have a report that was causing trouble in one of your knife shop."

That produced a blank look from Abi and Michelle. "I don't own a knife shop," Abi said, smiling.

"You are causing trouble. In place of knives," tried the other girl, again.

"Nope!"

"We have reports. You cause knives." The other girl blinked. "Sorry, you cause trouble."

Abi beamed. "I'd never do that in a place which sold good quality weaponry!" she said, cheerfully. "You have to keep them happy, you know!"

"Not helping," Michelle muttered in German, as she checked her sleeves were free in her new-bought kimono. "We should get down to the next landing. You know, so we have room." Slowly, she began to back down the stairs. "There are no cameras here," she remarked, as they backed away further. "And they're just a petty bunch of teenagers in costumes."

"Bullies," agreed Abi.

That was noted. "Stop moving!" was the order from one of the boys.

It was followed, but only when they got down to the next floor, and then the two girls spread out slightly. There was a faint pop of joints, as, smiling demurely, Abigael flexed her fingers behind her back.

The girl in the top hat glared at them, and in a motion which would have been shocking, had they not been the best friends of Yomiko Nagisa, flipped over their heads, cutting off the nearest exist. "Let me tell you, you ree~eeally can't run," she said, eyes gleaming. "You coming with us to Security station. People do not like people who are not fighting in a knife shop."

Abigael beamed. "We _weren't_fighting! That's what we were trying to tell you!"

"Abi, I think they have a thing about double negatives," Michelle muttered in their native tongue. "Because, otherwise, that makes no sense. Be ready. So... yeah."

"Talk to me! No one can see you here! Talk in English, tell me what you were doing, come with me to police station!" the girl shouted, her eyes flashing momentarily, and providing all the motive that they needed. They both knew they'd stand no chance if a Nephilim wanted to do something to them, in a fair fight.

And they _couldn't_be caught here. False documents might be able to pass shopkeepers, but they'd fall apart to a proper check. It had to be now, and the tiny blonde girl made a hand-gesture, which was acknowledged.

Her friend grinned innocently as Michelle stepped forwards. "We are just meeting a friend here," she said, smiling for the first time. "Can we just meet her first? She's right behind you now."

They could almost see the thought processes, as the Security girl translated the words for herself. And turned, to see whoever was behind her.

Only for the suddenly-unfolded electrified baton swung by the taller of the two girls to smash into the back of her knee, leaving her sprawling on the floor.

* * *

...

* * *

Yomiko wandered, dragging her suitcase of books behind her. She wiped her forehead against her sleeve, and sneezed, once. Most of the caffeine had left her system by now, broken down safely.

Emphasis on 'most'.

She was still attracted by bright colours, lights and noises. And was starting to feel peckish, because she had already managed to burn off most of the large amounts of sugar she'd been fed. By osmosis, if nothing else, it was logical that she would end up in an arcade, drawn by the scent of popcorn, roasted sugar, and greasy food.

As it so happened, the one she was drawn to, by factors of proximity, was packed with teenagers. Music blared loudly from dance-machines, and the barrage of gunfire from the shooters was a stattaco refrain to every thought. Boys and girls shouted, flirted, made out in the photobooths, and shrieked because they were sprayed by the sprinklers installed in aforementioned booths.

And Yomiko blended in very well, because almost all the girls had their hair dyed some shade of blue, and those boys who were not bleached grey or dyed red were that colour, too.

"Oh, no way am I Iti!" one girl said loudly, her obviously naturally black hair badly died pink and blue, pushing her way out of a box near the entrance. "Come on! I hate science!"

"You're just saying... sayin' that because you're jealous that I got Rei!" one of her companions retorted. "And that means I'm a better person than you!" Loudly, giggling and flicking their blue hair, which to Yomiko's eye was rather too bright, they pushed past the gangly girl with the far-too-grey hair.

The actual half-Ree in the room glanced at the booth, and at the seven faces arranged in a circle on its outside. The seven almost-identical, blue-haired, red-eyed, wide-grinning, pale-skinned faces.

Rei. Iti. Siyon. Zyuu (and her eyes narrowed further). Nana. Hatchi. Kiko.

The words "**THE BOOTH OF REECOGNITION**" were emblazoned in bright colours on the front, aided by the sub-title, "**Find out who YOU are most like with our patented "Hey" REEcognition technology, and get YOUR REEfined picture taken**." And the NERV logo.

"That. Is creepy," Yomi muttered to herself, through the buzz of sugar. "I know I'm half-Ayanami, but to see it this close... there shouldn't be so many people who look that much like Mama." There was a silent nod, and she glared at the names, setting them into 'ones she cared nothing for', and 'ones she hated'. "And... look. No sign of Mama. Just like _everywhere_in this city. Like they don't want to think she exists."

Yomiko couldn't help but feel rather insulted by this. It was probably this feeling, more than the caffeine speaking, which lead to her deciding to try the booth.

* * *

...

* * *

It should have been an unfair fight. Two baseline humans and a Second Generation Nephilim against a baseline and a girl with very slight inherited residual Angelic taint.

As it turned out, if the first party was made of teenage volunteers doing a Saturday job, used to stopping nothing more than vandals, and the second had received training from a former Theokotos, who was the mother of one of them, after a nasty kidnapping incident when they had been six, it was also unfair. Especially if action was deliberately taken to take out the Nephilim from surprise right at the start of the fight. And an electrified baton was used.

There was silence in the stairway.

Well, actually there wasn't. That was a lie. It was filled with the groans of the injured.

Abigael rubbed her skinned knuckles, and licked at them, wincing slightly. "What was up with that boy's skull?" she asked, with a slight frown that shifted into an innocent grin. "Ow. Should've used the baton on him too, but I don't like to do that to normal people. I don't want to hurt them. And that girl went down easy. Still, I don't think I hit her too hard." She sighed. "What's up with the world, that a group of teenage bullies given armbands and stupid authority like that can attack a bunch of innocent teenage girls in an stairwell, huh? Oh, Miche, you should probs stop kicking them when they're down."

Panting, Michelle gave one last kick to her fallen opponent, and stepped back, her expression of barely controlled rage fading back to her normal apathy. "It's a sign of the corrupting powers of corporate authority," she said, with a deep breath. "They get to use teenagers as police, and then give them no-one to watch over them."

"I mean, seriously? Do these people's corrupt corporate leaders not teach them how to really fight?" She licked her knuckles again. "I'm sorta disappointed. I mean, this is Japan! Where's the ninjas or the cybered-up street samurai or the teenage soldiers with explosive collars used to suppress all opposition?"

"I think that's more of a Kansai thing," Michelle said drolly, her nose wrinkling. "Urgh. I scuffed my boots. And stood in something. I think it was a burger. And on someone, but I don't think they smelt this bad."

There were groans from the fallen assailants, both boys suffering from the ministrations of a short German girl with a grudge against the world and the ability to kick high. The girl was unconscious, because Abi was quite aware of how fast such people could heal. The black eye, from where she had been kneed in the face, was already blossoming into pink, and as they watched, she stirred.

"Well... we're in trouble now," Michelle said, slowly. "Probably. We should move. God, where are you, Yomi? We need to _go_!"

* * *

...

* * *

In the darkness, Yomiko sat down, and then stood up again, as she adjusted the seat, so she was sitting at eye height to the camera. Carefully, she fed the yen into the machine, and noted that she was really low on money right now. She pushed the option for German on the machine, and listened as it started.

"Please sit," stated the machine.

"I _am_sitting."

"Make sure that your eyes are level with the marker. If you are too low or too high, the sensor may not register your image properly, and the Facial REEgenerator will not properly analyse your facial features."

"Done! Some of us read the instructions before..."

"... please wait." Blue, white and red lights lit up, almost blinding, and Yomiko blinked with a second set of eyelids before she suppressed the reflex. "Facial mapping in process. Please follow the instructions given, and keep your mouth closed unless ordered otherwise. First, look left..."

This was _bo~ooring_, Yomiko thought, as she followed the instructions, and then began to answer the tedious multiple choice questions. And most of them were very stupid indeed. What kind of question had "Blow it up" as an option for every single one? She answered as best she could, even though there was a growing urge to find a way to break the machine so it wouldn't patronise her any more.

"Question 15. There is a cute boy you like. What do you do?

a) EPIC SEDUCTION!  
b) Show him everything you like, and hope you share interests.  
c) Watch him and follow him, until you know everything about him.  
d) _Lui sangle vers le bas, et le monter jusqu'à ce qu'il meurt de déshydratation._  
e) Show off your... _impressive_ physique.  
f) Hug tiemz now.  
g) Blow it up."

Yomiko snarled slightly at d). It wasn't even correct French. Whoever had localised this had _not_been trying hard enough. And... she steepled her fingers, and glared at it. None of them worked for her, really. Whatever happen to "h) Talk to him normally... well, actually, blush and not actually go near him, but, really, some day you will, because he's really attractive and it makes your heart flutter when you watch him playing in those short shorts."

... not that she had a crush on the head of the school football team, who was tall, dark-haired, and in her brother's class, no.

Sighing, she selected a). It was the one which fit best under her "not stupid" criterion, all in all. All the others... well, apart from e), but that one was just showing off your body. At least a) was making sure that he liked you.

"Well done. You have answered all the questions. Now, we just need to perform our patented 'Heynalysis' (TM), and you can find out which Ayanami you'll be REEmade into!"

The blue-grey haired girl's hands tightened on the seat, and metal crunched. She _knew_which Ayanami she was from, and... although, normally at home, her mother was embarrassing beyond belief, was especially far, far too open about sex, worked too much when she was meant to be asleep, was too competitive and got into bitch-offs with Abi's mum, and... well, was basically a grown-up nerd, if she were honest... well, in this strange city, she felt she had to defend her!

...and also the 'Ree' puns were making Yomiko want to throttle someone.

"Now, just let loose with a 'Hey', and you can see your REEconstructed self!"

Yomiko coughed. "Hey," she said, flatly.

"No, no, no!" the machine recited. "That's not an Ayanami 'hey'! Put some heart into it!"

"Hey."

"No, no, no!" it repeated. "That's not an Ayanami 'hey'! Put some heart into it!"

Yomiko glared, and took a deep breath. They wanted a 'hey', did they? She'd give them one!

"**~He~ee~ey~!**" she screamed into the machine.

There was a pause.

"Now processing...  
Now processing...  
Now processing...  
Now...  
ERROR."

The machine sparked, crackled, and then starting letting out thick clouds of choking black smoke. Gasping, Yomiko stumbled out of the booth, grabbing her case of new books as she did.

That... probably wasn't meant to happen.

* * *

...

* * *

"So." Abi jinked right, hardly even sweating yet. "Right."

"I know that! The signs to the Pilotemporium are clear! And we need to..."

"Left!"

"Argh! How is Yomi going to find us if we get new costumes!"

Abigael's eyes were gleaming. "She'll know," she said, firmly. "She always knows."

* * *

...

* * *

"What did you do!" a boy asked angrily, at the front of the crowd which had formed at a distance around the smoking booth.

Yomiko didn't answer at first, as she was too busy choking on the fumes, shooting worried glances back at the machine.

"I said," he said, taking a step forwards, and squaring his shoulders, "what did you do!"

She focussed on him. His hair was bleached blond, and his T-shirt... she sniggered, at the realisation that it was apparently meant to look like her father. Which it didn't.

He didn't seem to find her amusement helpful. "Why'd you break it, huh?" he said, taking a further step forwards.

"I didn't break it," Yomi protested, now that she could get her breath. "It just started letting out smoke after I said 'hey' into it."

"Yeah. 'Cause that happened."

"It did! Eugh. _Sie sind ein Schwachsinniger?_" she muttered, angrily. "Why'd I break it?"

"I dunno," added a girl. "Why _would _you break it? Plus, the German is an Asuka thing, not a Ree thing... oh, hah! You're really German, aren't you, machine-breaker!"

"I didn't." Internally, Yomiko was fuming. She was putting up with the stupid machine breaking, and... oh, God. She needed to find Abigael and Michelle. She'd... she'd completely forgotten about them! What an idiot! What had she been doing? And... and what had been in those drinks? Some kind of... oh, God, some kind of caffeine. She wasn't allowed caffeine for a _very good reason_.

Another girl stepped forwards, in an affected skip, and darted forwards to the print-out, to snatch the paper away from the clouds of smoke. "Hee-eey," she called out, "look at this. She even broke the print-out! Just junk characters, and it didn't even ree-colour her hair on the print-out photo! Huh... maybe looks like it was trying to put you as Rei. Yeah, I think the letters match, under the junk and the spilt ink." She snorted. "And that's terrible dye you used, by the way. Guess you can't even look like a Ree, even if you dress like one."

"Maybe it didn't change it because I already look like one," Yomiko said, nostrils flaring despite the fact that she was trying to smirk.

There was laughter all around.

"What a joke! She doesn't look anything like any of the _real_Ayanamis, anyway."

Yomiko's mouth dropped open. "You've... actually met them to compare?" she asked.

"Dur! Of course!"

"You're foreign, aren't you? I bet where you come from, you can get away with just being ethnically Japanese, but her in Tokyo-3, we've got higher standards for our cosplay! And we do research and everything and visit all their shows and watch them on TV and _everything_!"

"Oh." Yomi's left eyelid twitched. "And just because I'm German, I can't have ever met one of the Ree, right?"

A boy with thick spectacles, which happened to be orange-tinted smirked. "I happen to know that one of them have ever done a European tour," he announced, in a slightly nasal tone. "That is, if you're discounting the Nobel Prizes, but Rei's was in 2022 along with the rest of the pilots, Iti's was in 2029, and Zyuu's was in 2033, and I don't count seeing them as a child. Even if you've ever been to Stockholm."

"And, seriously? Someone that flat trying for a Rei costume?" added a notably busty girl with dyed blue hair. "How did she think she could pull it off? Hah."

Something snapped inside Yomiko's head. Perhaps it was the fact that her self-control was stretched thin already, from the ill-chosen caffeinated drinks. Perhaps it was the fact that according to her body clock, it was six in the morning, she hadn't slept at all, and she was suffering from teleporter-lag, which was worse than jet-lag because you couldn't even sleep on the plane. Perhaps it was the fact that she was still feeling disconcerted from the echoes in the Angel War Museum, and not feeling too well inclined towards a city that would do that, even to monsters.

Maybe it was because she was sensitive about her bust, or, rather, lack of it.

Whatever the cause, all the ceiling lights in the arcade burst, showering glass down to accompanying screams. Only the sick glow of the many game screens illuminated the place, and they had all flickered to blue screens of death, the white text on them corrupted jargon.

The air _pulsed_, like the breath of some beast.

"What was that?" Yomiko Leliel Nagisa said, almost sweetly, a pale shape in the darkness. There was something about her that made the eyes ache, in the sick blue light. "Can you repeat that statement again?"

The teenagers suddenly paled, the air of swaggering arrogance gone completely. "Oh," one of them managed. "I think she _really_has red eyes. Not contacts. Really real. And... and they're glowing."

Glances were exchanged, and Yomiko's mouth split into a too-wide, predatory grin. And then even wider, with a cracking of bone. The light from her eyes began to bleed to white, the red overwhelmed by the terrible radiance from beneath her pale flesh.

"It's an Ayanami!"

"Wow!"

Yomiko blinked. "What, 'wow'?" she asked, confused, light streaming from her mouth.

"Can you say 'hey' for us?" one of the Japanese girls asked,

"Do the vent thing!"

"So..." Yomiko began, the light beneath her skin going out. She sounded as if she was trying to grasp a difficult concept, "... the... the everything doesn't disturb you? The darkness and the pulsing and the..."

She shook her head. People in Toyko-3 were _crazy_.

"It's _awesome_! Oooh! Which one are you related to? Can you fire eyebeams?"

One of the boys grinned. "Hey," he said, pointing at the busty girl. "She insulted you. That means you should totally Reip her! It's the natural order of things!"

"... what."

"Reip... or Kikope? Girl-on-girl, remember. Either is good, as long as we can watch."

Yomiko began to back away at this point. She had _no_idea what she had stumbled into, and she didn't want to know. Sure, some of Michelle's Japanese-made stuff was strange, but that wasn't real life. This was. A suggestion that she should rape someone. That was... she clutched onto her bag of books protectively. She didn't want to have to use it as a weapon, but she would if any of them came any nearer to her.

Things were made worse by the fact that... well, she knew she could do _stuff_ with tentacles which were really useful for hanging from things when both hands were full, but she was in Japan, and who knew what her _perverted_relatives could get up to here?

"Can we have your photo!" There was a flash of a camera-phone in the darkness, and another one, as they didn't wait for the answer. Yomiko shrieked, bombarded by lights in the darkness.

An AT-Field pulsed, knocking everyone off their feet, and incidentally wiping all electronics in a hundred-metre radius. And the girl was gone.

* * *

...

* * *

**ALERT!  
AT FIELD DETECTED  
BLOOD PATTERN TYPE BLUE: CONFIRMED  
BLOOD PATTERN TYPE ORANGE: CONFIRMED  
ANGEL: UNCONFIMED – ESTIMATE PROBABLE**

"... what the fuck does that mean!" demanded Commander Katsuragi, with an angry flick of her iron-grey hair.

"I... don't know," Dr Ikari-Soryu stated. "We're trying to isolate it, and..."

"Have you checked that PERSOPHONE is secure?" the Commander demanded.

"Yes." The redhead could be clear on that. "She's still pinned. No movement, no AT-Field. She's suppressed."

"Located!" reported one of the NERV technicians. "It's... it's in See-Squared!"

A brief silence. Everyone knew the casualties that a confrontational Angel could inflict. And an infiltration one... among that dense, swarming crowd of humanity? That was almost more horrible.

"Evacuate everyone!" ordered Misato. "Get everyone into the bunkers! Tell... yes, use the Terrorist Excuse, because it'll cause less panic, but get them out of there!" She took a deep breath. "Are the Evas ready to scramble?"

"Pilot Shirai is in Unit 00, Ichi reports that the Mark 01 is ready, and Uri has Zwei prepped," reported Hikari, looking up. "Zenith, report!"

"_Plug insertion in progress for me_," reported her own teenage voice. "_Pilot Takahashi has cleared final checks for Unit 04a._"

"Be ready to scramble at a moment's notice," Commander Katsuragi ordered, "... but don't deploy. Until we've located it, we can't send Evas into See-Squared without demolishing the place. I want it cleared as much as possible first. Are the FENRIS PROBES deployed yet?"

"Just waiting the go-ahead, ma'am."

"Then, launch!"

* * *

...

* * *

Sirens blaring, two German girls huddled down in the crowded bunker on the other side of the world from their homes, unable to get back. The people in here were panicked, worried, and they were no exception. Behind them, a vent shaft silently opened, and a blue-grey haired figure dropped down behind them, a small suitcase of books trailing behind her.

Yomiko sighed. "Urgh. Took me too long to find you two. Do you know what's going on? They said something about terrorists." She reached down to pluck the red wig off Michelle, and the blond one from Abi. "And what's with the change in disguises? Ooh, by the way, Michelle, that kimono looks really nice on you, though you've got it tied wrong."

"Okay, okay, okay," Abigael began, speaking rapidly, "before you start blaming us or telling us off or something, I would just like to say that it was _not our fault!_"

Yomiko gritted her teeth. "I know it's not your fault," she said. "I didn't mean to..."

"I mean, yes, thinking about it, we didn't need to club one of what was probably one of your cousins unconscious in an stairwell... oh, and two of her friends... but in our defence, they were bullies with costumes and they were about to arrest us and our passports couldn't pass a proper check and you'd never find us if we got away and we really, really didn't want to be trapped here in Japan and we really needed to find you."

"... lose control in a..." Yomi trailed off, her mouth flapping. "You did _what_?" she hissed.

"We done goofed," Michelle said, drily. "Now, what did you do when you were off on caffeine?"

"Ahem." The red-eyed girl coughed. "Well, I sort of recategorised someone's books and repainted his shop and I bought a load of books. And-may-have-sort-of-wrecked-an-arcade-but-let's-not-talk-about-that. We have more important things to talk about! What the hell, you two! My... my cousin?"

"Her hair was sort of blue and brown, she had reddish-brown eyes... which could sort of glow, by the way, we did check... and she looked a lot like your Mum. You know, a bit how like Logos looks like your dad," Abi said, hanging her head. "Second Generation Nephilim, almost certainly."

"... you know, technically that makes her genetically a half-sister... no!" Yomi balled her hands into fists. "Seriously! Why would you do that! I was the one who was drugged up on caffeine, not you! Why would you go assault random security people!"

"It wasn't random!" Michelle burst out. "She was going to take us, and there were no cameras around, and... and look, she was corporate, not a real police person. She had no legal right to take us anywhere!" Blue-grey eyes glared at Yomiko. "I am _not_going to be snatched by someone wearing a top hat and a monocle! And I think the fact there seems to be some kind of terrorist incident going on is more serious than who we may or may not have attacked!"

There was a slap, as Yomi facepalmed. "Right. Okay." She sighed. "Well, we kind of mucked this up, didn't we? And by 'we', I really mean... well, no, we all sort of did." She wrapped her arms around her friends' shoulders in a hug. "I guess you must have really been freaking out because I'd vanished, and there'd be no way to get back."

"Miche certainly was, even if she was trying to hide it," Abi said, hugging back.

"Was not."

"Was too!" The red-blonde girl shrugged. "So, we're going to head off now?"

The blue-grey haired girl smirked. "There is one teeny-tiny thing I want to do first. See, in the fuss, we didn't get to actually see the gaghielim at the aquarium. I mean, they're like the only ones in the world, and they feed them israpenguins and..." she saw the dubious expression on her friends' faces. "Come on. It's just an aquarium. It'll be peaceful and nice and a good way of getting off the stress from all this."

"I don't know, Yomi..."

"And," the girl winced, "it's easier to do the calculations for the jump from sea level," she admitted. "Japan-to-Germany is sort of a long way, and... um, well, if we're underground here..."

"Do it," the blonde blurted out instantly. "Really. If it means we don't end up kilometres up this time... really. I hate heights."

Yomiko nodded. "Then it's settled. Okay, we'll just go to somewhere less watched, and we can jump over to the seafront bits, away from the lake." There was a trace of something which was either melancholy or tiredness in her voice, as she added, "Then we can go home."

* * *

...

* * *

First Lieutenant Kirima Harasami smiled faintly, tapping her fingers against the wall of the bunker, despite her concern. What was happening today was... odd. Very odd. Anomalous Patterns, the screaming of the Dirac sensors... Tokyo-3 had seen nothing like this in 20 years. This "terrorist incident" made it worse; she knew it was one of the cover stories for a possible Angelic Incident, although, of course, Tokyo-3 was no stranger to terrorism. And despite the fact that she never wanted to see anything like the Angel War again, it made her oddly proud, and unsurprisingly terrified, to be part of NERV if anything like that was about to start happening again.

And Prime Minister Aoba had used to have her current job! It was amazing, when she thought about it. That she could be following in the footsteps of such a square-jawed, heroic, respected figure, who was renowned for his lack of fear in pushing through painful reforms, his careful balancing between nationalist groups and the necessary compromises with LUNA, and, four years ago, when the then-Defence Minister was kidnapped by terrorists, that he had withstood torture for almost eight hours before he was found, telling them nothing but 'I've had worse'. She couldn't see how such an august man could have been satisfied with her role, but it was something to try to live up to.

Well, try, before getting shy or scared or tongue-tied.

And at the moment, she was baby-sitting. Well... 9-year old sitting; Ariel Ikari-Soryu wasn't really a baby any more. That was besides the point. Certainly, despite the fact that she still didn't like the girl's father, little Ari was one of the most adorable children that she'd ever met. But she would really rather not be doing it in a shallow bunker, and she really would rather be taking the girl back to the Geofront. So she really needed to look towards finding the Section 2 people in this bunker, who would inevitably be here, and getting them to override the security lockdown which...

"Kiri," Ariel said, tugging at her sleeve. "I need to go to the toilet."

"Oh. Um." Kiri blinked. "How m-much?" she asked, cautiously.

"Kinda a lot. Kinda _really_a lot." The girl blushed. "I had the large juice, remember."

"Oh." Kiri looked around, with a hint of desperation. "Okay, it's over there. Do you want me to come with you?" she asked.

The little girl pouted. "I _am_nine," she said, sulkily. "I can go to the toilet on my own. I don't need you to pull down my panties and..."

The woman coughed loudly. "I understand, Ari," she said, motioning to take the little girl's hand, and begin moving through the crowd. "I'll be waiting outside the door, and then we can go back to your Mama, okay?"

"'Kay!"

* * *

...

* * *

The oval that appeared in the air was as black and the void, though shot through with glimmers of light, and Yomiko lead the way through. It was the best way, because if she had misjudged the height, it meant that she could catch the others.

Michelle screamed, her eyes clamped shut, as she stepped through the portal, bracing herself. Only to stumble and fall over on the pavement.

Her friends snickered, as she picked herself off the ground. "Ha ha," she said, in a profoundly unamused voice.

"It was pretty funny, actually," Yomi remarked, with a shrug. "I was only ten centimetres off the ground. You screamed like I was a kilometre up."

"You were. Last time. And I hate heights. And... Abi, it's not that funny."

The taller girl wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and picked herself off the ground. "Heh. Heh. That was pretty slick, Yomi."

"Why, thank you."

Abi smiled. "And the toilet stop was kinda useful, too. So." She glanced over at the sea, which was... well, it wasn't that pleasant looking right now, a scummy layer of reddish algae covering the surface. "Wow. What happened here?"

"Says they've had problems with plantlife here since 2018," Yomi said, after a glance at a board. "Sign says it's nitrogen pollution, which makes the algae grow too fast, and chokes the seaside."

"That is _not_what they show the shots in the films as the sea looking like," the reddish-blonde girl said, disapprovingly. "That's just all polluted and ugly and..."

"Wow!" someone said from behind them in Japanese, young and small and female. "I'm right by the seaside now! And I was under See-Squared a few seconds ago! That is _totally awesome!_"

The three girls whirled, to meet the cheerful blue-eyed gaze of a nine year old girl, a guileless grin on her face. Auburn hair framed a heart-shaped face, that looked to blend European and Japanese blood in some proportion. Arms spread wide, the girl did a little pirouette, taking in the sunlight around her.

"Who's she?" Abi asked, frowning.

* * *

...


End file.
